Well it’s almost Summer

It’s getting pretty close to summer here on the Gold Coast and now my eyes are watching the weather charts more closely, waiting for the storms to come. This time of year I tend to keep an eye on the ‘Australian Severe Weather’ website’s forum and try to learn more about predicting when these storms are likely to occur. This also introduced me to a whole new range of charts, maps and diagrams measuring Cape, Li index, Shear and more. Trying to understand this I was pointed in the direction of Anthony Cornelius’s ‘DownUnder Storm Chasing Guide’ a must read if interested in learning how to predict these events (check out his website for his images or Redbubble) so with quiet days I spend time reading and going over these charts trying to learn/remember how each one relates and how to interpret the data they contain.
Friday the 13th today and there’s a slight possibility for storms to develop in S.E Qld today going by the Bureau of Meteorology, it’s a possibility but with the current cloud cover, the temperatures won’t be that high. So, I’m looking a little further ahead and next week from Tuesday the 17th onwards shows some instability for this region.The above map shows the predicted Cape for Wednesday the 18th of November. Combine that with the Lifted Indexes from below Going by these two models and interpreting the data using Anthony Cornelius’s ‘DownUnder Storm Chasing Guide’it looks like from this early stage, a very good day for Thunderstorms to develop. There’s another chart that I’m now going to try and understand called the Skew-T Still trying to get my head around this chart, working out what the lines mean and how they represent Cape, Shear, Tempreture, Due Point etc – It’s a change from how I have previously gone out looking for a decent storm to Photograph by observing the weather conditions in my region. These images are found on the BSCH – Stormcast website and will now be a real useful tool for me in trying understand how, when, where and why Severe Weather events will occur. Another good service available is provided by “The Early Warning Network”, you’ll get a text message and email delivered to you when Severe Weather is predicted for your area.