After so long without storms, today kind of crept up on me. The speculators promised more than what was delivered, but what was delivered was still rather nice, especially against a gorgeous orange and pink sunset.

Despite getting some lunchtime rumbles in the southern suburbs of Brisbane, the word was that the best activity would be inland so Drew and I took off towards Warwick. Once on the New England Hwy there are options north to Toowoomba or south to Warwick. With a cell already dumping near Allora and not much to the south, we headed north to Allora for whatever we could get.

What we got turned out to be not much. There had been a few cells around already today that, thanks to low shear, would start but not last long enough to get organised.

Some new updrafts to our ESE (near Boonah) were looking particularly chumpy so near Allora we jumped on a road NE to Gatton, stopping on the way for some pics.

The road was quite picturesque and a bit mountainous which restricted our view, but just south of Gatton the landscape opened up. We'd spotted a few lightning flashes on the way which we hoped would continue through the sunset and into the night.

Rain interupted us here so we hit the Warrego Hwy and shot west towards Toowoomba. A few minutes down the road the rain stopped, and so did we. We were then treated to a brilliant sunset where we scored a couple of apparently rare (for this storm) CGs.

A bizarre shelf-cloud looking thing then developed to our west as it darkened. Not sure about the cause but it looked quite solid for a time.

Besides the occasional burst of short-lived activity, lightning strikes were unfortunately few and far between today. I consider us pretty lucky to have caught these ones around Gatton. As soon as we caught the triple bolt above, we both decided the day had been worthwhile, despite the lack of activity otherwise!