27 January 2013

West Macgregor twister!

27 January 2013 | By johnboy

This in from Chris:

Footage has been uploaded to youtube, this was captured at Macgregor, 1810 local time during todays storm. I think it passed just behind the houses and headed out towards the empty fields. The sound was crazy.

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Gregsoandso1:21 pm 30 Jan 13

Conan of Cooma said :

Gregsoandso said :

My chase partner and i were slightly caught out of position as we make the call to chase just north of Gunning, but managed to get back to the NE flank of the Canberra storm which proved to be the most spectacular structure wise where we could see all the dynamics at play. We did get into the northern flank of main rain core, and i’ve gotta say i’m not surprised it dumped 60-70mm in some of the northern burbs.

You’ve missed out on some excellent storms down Cooma/Nimmitabel/Bombala way in the last two years.

Yes, and don’t i know it! Due to work or other commitments i’ve had to be content with radar from afar. There was a tornado near Bombala on the 11th of November 2011. There was small right up on it:
http://www.bombalatimes.com.au/story/1103152/bombalas-tornado/
And there was some footage on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CJb4SIeRuI

I chased on the 20th of Jan last year near Bredbo and stayed on a stationary Tornadic supercell for the better part of 90mins which produced a brief tornado out in no-mans land:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyNP6399zm4&list=PLE42D18B120129768

The Monaro corridor as well as the far SE corner has access at times to good wind shear, so storms can be highly organised. Another tornado of note was the one between Nimmitabel & Cooma 23rd December 2008. It was a strong tornado too, doing some significant damage to trees and tracked for around 10kms on the ground from the damage reports i’ve seen.
http://www.blackheathweather.com/generalphotos/tornado23-12-08b.jpg

Another storm chaser also capture a tornado near Gunning a couple years back too…. so you could almost say we’re in a tornado hot spot of sorts.

Gregsoandso1:01 pm 30 Jan 13

astrojax said :

is a storm chaser a twitcher of weather?

I guess you could say that. Similar to a bird watcher, you would anticipate where your bird / storm is likely to be – so you just ry and be in the right place at the right time to document it. But storm chasing can be perhaps a touch more of a white knuckle ride:)

Gregsoandso12:27 pm 30 Jan 13

Chop71 said :

I think there may have been several other touch down points. Corner of Tyllard and Gininderra Drive (some bigger gums down) and on bottom of Jauncey Court / Bettington Street and along Lohtsky street.

Thanks for that. We have already noted the Tyllard / Gininderra damage which forms the Eastern most point of our path thus far. We will definitely check out Jauncey Court / Bettington as it appears to be inline with our general path that we’ve mapped out already.

p112:19 pm 30 Jan 13

A friend lives on Rowland St, Macgregor.

Two wheelie bins started twelve houses up the street and ended up across the road. A neighbour a couple of houses up had their fence fall over, and this happened to his roller door…

astrojax11:54 am 30 Jan 13

is a storm chaser a twitcher of weather?

Chop7111:15 am 30 Jan 13

I think there may have been several other touch down points. Corner of Tyllard and Gininderra Drive (some bigger gums down) and on bottom of Jauncey Court / Bettington Street and along Lohtsky street.

Conan of Cooma10:56 am 30 Jan 13

Gregsoandso said :

My chase partner and i were slightly caught out of position as we make the call to chase just north of Gunning, but managed to get back to the NE flank of the Canberra storm which proved to be the most spectacular structure wise where we could see all the dynamics at play. We did get into the northern flank of main rain core, and i’ve gotta say i’m not surprised it dumped 60-70mm in some of the northern burbs.

You’ve missed out on some excellent storms down Cooma/Nimmitabel/Bombala way in the last two years.

Gregsoandso10:49 am 30 Jan 13

Prose111 said :

It may have touched down in Clendinnen Street through to Waterworth Street in Dunlop. 2 houses (Clendinnen) lost part of their roofs with about 5 other houses with tiles missing. Next door neighbours front colourbond gates (Waterworth) ripped to shreds along with their pergola. This all happened in a very narrow field.

Thanks for that info, we may have a chance to look into it further to see if a secondary satellite tornado formed, which happens quite often around a wall cloud complex.Troy Barrett and myself went out on Monday to map out a preliminary path, but it’s not fully completed as we ran out of light.
We’ll be supplying this information to the Bureau Of Meteorology next week along with a detailed report. So please, any additional info that you can think of would be appreciated.

Prose1119:21 am 29 Jan 13

It may have touched down in Clendinnen Street through to Waterworth Street in Dunlop. 2 houses (Clendinnen) lost part of their roofs with about 5 other houses with tiles missing. Next door neighbours front colourbond gates (Waterworth) ripped to shreds along with their pergola. This all happened in a very narrow field.

Chris844:04 pm 28 Jan 13

Sorry didn’t post replies sooner, mostly been responding on youtube side.

This footage was captured from West Macgregor, looking North towards Dunlop, at 1810 local time. It took some time to form, but once the vortex started to drift down, a secondary vortex of condensation rose from the ground and slowly made its way up, but this is not very clear from the footage. Once there appeared to be touchdown, a debris field formed quickly around the vortex as it headed in a west direction very quickly. The ground side of the vortex tracked far quicker than the cloud side, but a faint tube of condensation could be seen connecting the two ends, bending at fairly large angles. It appeared to track towards the mountains, pretty crazy sound too.

Gregsoandso10:39 am 27 Jan 13

That’s very interesting footage considering that it appears to correspond to a hook type of signature at precisely 6:10pm on radar archive.

However can i confirm which part of the storm did you capture this? Was it on the front edge of the storm or sorta on the rear or side? This will help identify if it was a tornado or a weaker cousin called a gustnado.

The conditions was ripe for super cells (storms with rotating up draughts) due to strong upper level winds from the NNW, which backed to a ENE at the low level providing ample moist fuel for the storms in the area. Yesterday has been easily the best set up so far to what has been a very disappointing storm season for us storm chasers down this way. Being a saturday, many chasers were out on the hunt yesterday. I wont go into the technical terms, but i can say yesterday was textbook stuff.

The storm was a right mover to the mean steering winds (so it deviates to the upper level winds which usually direct the flow of the weather), which i think was due to the trough line being right over the top of us at the time, acting like a freeway for the storm to move down south instead of SE. I’ll be pouring over all the obs today to see why this storm in particular became a supercell, and not other cells in the area.

I got message from a friend in the Hall area who said that there was a wall cloud, which is the last phase before a funnel is produced.

My chase partner and i were slightly caught out of position as we make the call to chase just north of Gunning, but managed to get back to the NE flank of the Canberra storm which proved to be the most spectacular structure wise where we could see all the dynamics at play. We did get into the northern flank of main rain core, and i’ve gotta say i’m not surprised it dumped 60-70mm in some of the northern burbs.

Here’s one photo i took from the Gundaroo – Murrumbateman rd as we tried to blast west to get a closer look (just put it your browser and hit enter if the link doesn’t work:

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8492/8417263484_0929acde36_c.jpg

I’ll post some other footage from some of my chase friends who were on the storm yesterday when it comes to hand.

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