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Sydney - Bathurst - Blayney - Bathurst - Sydney
Models today looked prime for storm development, with widespread -5 lis and widespread cape 2000+. Shear was progged to be around 25-30kts @ 500 and 14kts @ 850 in our target area at Bathurst; however shear was expected to increase later. Expecting it to fire late, we headed off around 11am, shortly after a thundery rain band had moved through NSW from a line that moved through South Australia and Victoria the previous day. Arriving at Bathurst a bit after 2pm the sky was not looking promising, just low level orographic cu about. We had a drive around, went for a drive to Mount Panorama then played some cricket for a while (the ball was swinging MAJORLY :D). A cell NE towards us tried to get going with insane updrafts briefly, but fizzled out rather quickly. Another cell way to the N got going, perhaps N of Gulgong, it looked impressive for a while. It was beginning to look dark to the south. We planned to meet up with Andy, who was also chasing and was at Orange. However Keith and my gut feeling told us to go towards Cowra. This did seem like a good decision at the time. We got around 10km from Blayney before seeing several rfb’s with an intense rain core a fair distance away
New updrafts were going up ahead of it and quickly developed into a thundery shower, with thunder quite frequent. Thinking this cell would do nothing and noticing a cell that had developed towards Orange (which was Dann’s SC for the day, someone else chasing out this way today). Our storm had developed directly south of this.
Heading towards this cell I turned around and noticed a heavy precipitation core heading our way, and the thundery shower we were under 10 minutes ago had seemed to intensify. By the time we got out of Blayney it had developed a weak RFB, which intensified rapidly. The turbulence is clearly shown.
The RFB dissipated and developed into a decent guster quite quickly. It was evident the cell was intensifying and behind the guster you could see strong winds. In the distance we could see red updrafts, which was another supercell south of orange.
As it got overhead we started getting close strikes. The amazing feature of this guster was the vertical rotation in it. It wasn’t rotating circular but different parts of the guster were moving around, being sucked in, and sucked out. It was really quite amazing.However, where this rotation was occuring was in a circular shape in the gustfront.
Winds started picking up to 70-80km/h and pea sized hail begun falling, so we turned around as Keith didn’t want his car dented. We fled quite effectively, despite running into 3cm hail under the storms RFB, which was only weak now. We saw the gustfront out to the back, and it looked quite good, though we didn’t pull over for pictures because of the hail risk. We got to Bathurst and found some good shelter. Getting out of the car we ran up a hill to get photos of the storm bearing down. By the time we had gotten there the guster had changed its appearance, and in fact, could have developed into a wall cloud.
Large drops begun to fall and we headed for cover. The storm’s lightning was constant, though we couldn’t see much of it as the shelter blocked the view to the north, unfortunately. We did see some awesome CG’s though. It rained quite heavily, and hailed on and off and we managed hail to 1.5cm. After waiting a while we headed off towards Blayney to investigate any damage that might of occurred, and checking out possible hail drifts. We ran into cells though on the way down, one, perhaps the cell that had been the supercell going by radar, which contained extremely heavy rainfall, small hail and winds gusting to 100km/h. We had crazy CC’s and CG’s going down all around the place. We quickly got out of the cells and watched them flash away in the distance. The drifts had been washed away but there was lots of debris from the winds before, we would have put them to 100km/h. After trying to get lightning photos we headed home, with lightning flashing away to our east all night, with some brilliant crawlers. All in all a great chase, despite not getting a supercell.