Darling Downs tornado: Storm chaser footage shows tornado form in ‘insane supercell’ over southeast Queensland
Like a scene out of The Wizard of Oz, storm chasers have captured the “unbelievable” moment a tornado forms out of a supercell of storms battering southeast Queensland.
Severe Weather Australia shared footage of the twister forming near the Darling Downs community of Kaimkillenbun at about 3.40pm (AEST) on Thursday.
The footage shows dark clouds hovering in the sky near the small town of about 248 people, situated about two-hours west of Brisbane, as a funnel pulls out of the base and snakes its way toward the ground.
“Insane supercell,” the camera man says in the video as he watches the supercell swirl in the distance.
The tornado emerged amid severe weather warnings from the Bureau of Meteorology for the sunshine state, following a week of severe storms and damaging winds that lashed large parts of NSW.
The ferocious winds whipped through Sydney, causing trees to fall on pedestrians and property, ripped roofs from buildings and left more than 120,000 properties without electricity.
On Thursday morning, an intense storm crossed the Northern Rivers district of NSW into parts of Queensland’s Gold Coast, bringing more than 20mm of rain — 34.2mm was recorded at Coolangatta — and winds up to 119km/h — those gusts were observed at Australia’s most easterly point, Cape Byron at 9:43am AEDT, according to Weatherzone.
While Brisbane missed out on the rain and winds that brought a brief influx of cool air from the south, the Bureau of Meteorology has issued a heatwave warning, with the state’s capital heading for atop of 37C on Friday — close to the city’s hottest recorded day temperature of 37.4C which was recorded on January 16, 2024.
The southeast could expect milder temperatures into the weekend, when a cooler southerly change sweeps in on Friday evening or Saturday morning, according to the Bureau of Meteorology.
Queenslanders, particularly in the north, may be more familiar with the devastating effects of cyclones — which are about a thousand times larger than a tornado and form over warm waters of the South Pacific and Indian Ocean.
Tornadoes, on the other hand, often grow out of severe thunderstorms. They have been reported on all continents bar Antarctica, but are most frequently observed in the Great Plains region of the United States.
Australia sees tornadoes more often than people realise, the Bureau of Meteorology says. It estimates between 30 to 80 of the twisters are observed across the country each year.
Tornadoes form when weakly rotating air near the surface is rapidly drawn upwards into a cumulus or cumulonimbus (storm) cloud. As it rises, the air column stretches out and rotates faster.
To be classified as a tornado, the column of air must be in contact with the ground and its “parent cloud” at the same time, the BOM says.
Winds inside a tornado can exceed 300 km/h and the cells can last for less than a minute to over an hour and vary from just metres-wide to more a kilometre-wide.
There are two main types of tornadoes — supercell and non-supercell — which form in different ways.
The former, supercell tornadoes are associated with supercell thunderstorms, which form when there is a large change in wind speed and direction with height. All thunderstorms have columns of rapidly rising warm air (updrafts) which, in a supercell, rotate slowly creating a low pressure area that draws air upward (creating the necessary stretching to form a tornado).
Supercell tornadoes are more common in southeast Queensland as well as central and eastern NSW and northeast Victoria in late spring or early summer. They can also occur in the outer rainbands of tropical cyclones.
Non-supercell tornadies form along the boundaries of different air masses — such as cold fronts and sea breeze fronts — where theere are sharp changes in wind direction causing pockets of air rotation drawn upward by cumulus clouds. They can develop quickly and move fast.
In recent decades, Australia has seen multiple tornado events. On September 28, 2016, a storm produced seven tornadoes that ripped through central and eastern parts of South Australia, leading to a state-wide power outage.
Another tornado in 2013 crossed northeast Victor and travelled up to the NSW border, damaging townships along the Murray River.
In 2021, a tornado swept through western NSW causing damage to houses, power lines and trees in the Clear Creek area, northeast of Bathurst.
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