29th November 2003

A trough had been firing off storms for 2 days in South Australia's west and eventually looked like it would impact upon Adelaide on Saturday 29th November.

We actually awoke to storms off KI (as there was the evening before), and some nice castellenus in the sky. By mid morning this was already convecting and pretty soon a mid-level storm was heading across the gulf towards us. Not a huge amount of lightning but there was some deep rumbles of thunder. Unfortunately the line of storms seemed to be at its best just along the coast and died pretty quickly as it headed inland.

The storms died off around lunchtime and I was off to play tennis. I got home around 3.30pm to find more storms were brewing to the west and north west. (with storms still going off down near KI) In particular I was interested in some cells forming up near Cleve and heading in a SE direction. I decided to head north to intercept this stuff as it came down through the Lower North area. I picked up Andrew and headed up towards Pt Wakefield. Nothing very impressive really on the way. There were some cells out in the gulf that looked like they may do something but nothing was really happening.

We arrived at Pt Wakefield and we could see an area of darker cloud to our north but again it didn't seem to be doing much. But as we got to the town I spotted a CG come out of nowhere so we headed East to Balaklava and as we got closer we spotted more Cgs.
We noticed some smoke off to our north which looked like it had just been started by a lightning strike so we ventured up another road northwards to get a better look. We stopped the car on the side of the road as the storms seemed to pick up in intensity. Majority of the lightning was CC's but we did see a couple of nice Cg's, often popping out of the most unsuspecting places.

We decided to move off after awhile as the storms were heading more behind us to the SE and we were hoping to catch some night lightning shots. As we headed back towards Tarlee and then Kapunda we spotted this nice rain shaft. (below) We eventually stopped again to re-assess the situation just west of Truro.

Radar 6.08pm 29/11/03

As the sun was beginning to set it looked like storms were starting to fire through the northern suburbs of Adelaide and on the Plains so we headed back down the Sturt Hwy towards Gawler. A few nice CG's were observed as we continued. One cell started dropping very large and heavy drops of rain which increased to quite a heavy shower. The drops were so big and large we were hoping that we would get some hail but that didn't eventuate. We continued to watch these cells put out occasional Cgs as we got to Adelaide but then decided that they were quickly heading over the hills so we called it a day.