Brisbane Winter Morning Storm June 09

I know it isn’t storm season any more but this was just bizarre.

It was a sunny winter’s morning, I was warm in bed dreaming about how wonderful it was to be asleep and such when I did wake up to hear voices outside: “The rain is coming.” Great, either there is rain coming or I’ve woken up in ad for frozen vegetables. Then I heard a wheelie bin smashing into something, but not one of those wheelie bins you put garbage in, one of those enormous heavenly wheelie bins of the sky that are usually only heard in summer.
I jumped out of bed and looked out both windows to see clear skies to the east and the north. Then on parental advice I left my room and checked the radar on a computer that was already on and my gosh there was a thunderstorm heading straight for us. And us in this case means anyone in South East Queensland who hadn’t been hit yet. This storm was very wide and moving very fast and it was heavy rain according to the radar.
So naturally I went back to my room and turned my own computer on. I heard a bit more thunder and then suddenly, only 3 minutes after having woken, the great wheelie bin of the sky tipped up and poured vast quantities of water down to the earth.

The BoM site did not have a warning for this storm, or any storm, so you had to go to the radar to see it. On Twitter @bnestorm had tweeted that a thunderstorm was 70km away from Ipswich CBD at 7:55am. This was a proper thunderstorm it would seem according to both the internet and outside my window, so I headed out to the storm observation deck, still in my pyjamas, and checked it all out.

Final Statistics:
Wind: yes
Rain: yes
Lightning: yes
Hail: no
Blackout: no
House damage: no
Car damage: no
Human damage: no

Side yard: flooded
Car-tracks: wet
Breezeway 1: wet
Breezeway 2: wet outsides
Front Yard: wet
Carport: mostly dry
Inside the house: dry

There was a point while I was still observing from behind glass (as I deserved before 9am on a Sunday morning!) where the wind was blowing the rain at quite a spectacular angle. Really what has made this storm so amazing is it is June! And it hit before 9am! The two things that everyone knows about Brisbane thunderstorms is they happen from October to March and they happen in the afternoon or evening. They don’t happen in June in the morning. Except this one. So yeah the storm itself was pretty good, not outstanding by summer standards, but out of sheer shock at its existence it will score highly.

Brisbane storm 7th June 2009:
Total Score: 7/10