What an awsome storm this was! Absolutely loads of lightning (0ver 15000 strikes!) and some great structure, but then all storms have great looking structure according to me!

Pitty I couldn't get in the thick of it.

An upper cold pool of air ( -22C 500mb ) was actually moving South Eastwards rather than the typical North Eastwards track. As it came over sunny skies and good early morning temps (18C) and dewpoints (12 to 13C) initiated evelopment early with towers going up on the plains with no cap to inhibit ther development. Soon some of these went to Cb and a few towers to the NW begun to produce lightning but nothing intense. Shear wasn't very good not rising above 35 knots throughout the windshear profile, this meant storms that formed early would'nt really go anywhere and would collapse after their mature phase pretty quickly which they did.

  

Some nice instability began to form again which looked to be helped by a NE / S convergence, only light at this stage but it keeped things alive until the front moved through. An area just SW of Christchurch was to be where the main storm system for today would form. After having taken a few pictures of this new development I went back to the office and then after a while went back outside again and saw nice big Cu congestus go to Cb around NZDT 3:00pm. No lightning was happening yet but this Cb would grow to become quite big aided by the convergence.

   
 

So back to the office I went (Such fun!) and then I went out for another walk when things were getting dark at around NZDT 4:00pm. By now lots of strikes were beggining to happen in the area SW of Chch (look at the tracker screen capture!). I couldn't see anything yet (lightning that is) from where I was but it was dark on the plains. And unfortunately I wasn't to see much! As the darkness came over I got to see some nice Cg's and Ic lightning but no more than 10 strikes all up. I had to go back to the office as it began to rain.

 

The wind shifted to SW and then the Cb began to move on through. As it did I saw some nice vertical structure through the murk that looked impressive, it gave off one more rumble then it was heavy rain as the Cb moved off to the NE which it then soon dissapated. It's a bugger I can't give a more action packed report but had I been SW of Christchurch there would've been loads to tell I'm sure!

Of course there were other storm enthused buddies out there that got some pics to which is of great help!

Steven Graham in Templeton got some frames of lightning on his video camera where he was situated closer to the action, he also got some nice shots of the developing Cb. As you can notice it shows similar things to my Cb photo's, just from a different angle which is always good to see.

  
 

Aaron Wilkinson - Copyright notice