This day we observed a storm moving up the coast from the Ashburton River mouth, we sighted a waterspout forming offshore and various lightning strikes.
As the circulation that was the water spout came onto land it went over the top of Steven Burrows car and violently chugged the car up and down nearly flipping it, thankfully this area of circulation then dissipated. A bit too close to the storm perhaps!
The last of the 3 photo’s below shows the circulation that is the waterspout in the middle in the distance, if you go up on an angle slightly to the right you can see the circulation in the cloud above, not the pointy cloud, more the broader round smooth one just to the left of the pointy cloud.
I better get some more reports up, it’s only been nine years since I last put a report up so not all that long??? lol!!!
I work as a weather forecaster these days for Weatherwatch.co.nz and have done so for quite a while now, juggling my interest for storms / writing storm reports on here and my day to day job has been a bit of an issue for a while but I think the time is right to start chugging out some reports on this site again. I’ve still chased storms whenever I could, I just haven’t put the reports / photos up till now.
I’ve got a fair few to go, the last 9 years worth! I won’t be able to remember all the details about some of the following chases but I’ll let the photos do the talking 🙂
Naturally the following storm I do not remember everything but there were two cells this day. The first one was the better one in terms of lightning and hail and must have formed on a small trough (pre-frontal trough) ahead of the main southerly change which a second storm formed on. The first storm had some large hail associated with it as can be seen by the below photos, this hail fell around Mount Somers where I lived at the time. We saw rotation in the cloud too so perhaps a short lived super cell type situation. The second storm did have a nice gust front to it though.
I had some chaser convergence on the road and ran into Ben Rodriguez somewhere between Rakaia and Ashburton, Ben took a cool photo of me and took some great photos of the gust front! Fellow stormchasers.co.nz chaser Steven Burrows was out chasing also and took some photos plus made a video.
From memory I think we figured the main change / front would bring the best storms on this day but the first one on the trough line ended up being better. Something I’ve always remembered going forward about how the best storm could form ahead of the main change, but at the end of the day you assess where the sweet spot could be and then chase accordingly and do your best.
