Steve Shearer June 3, 2010

Heavy day at the Ox. One of the heaviest ever.

It was minutes after finishing the forecast notes last night that the latest wind obs and radar images confirmed a low centre had formed somewhere between Byron Bay and the border. I said to my wife, "We're on the wrong side of this low, we're gunna get smashed tonight".

By 2am a savage electrical storm was in progress. I got up to check the radar images: an intense slow moving cell was moving slowly north by nor-nor west inland from Ballina by my reckoning as the south-west flank of an intense low circulation which was tracking just offshore. I went back to bed thinking the cell would clear the coast around Byron Bay sometime before dawn and that with a southwards movement of the parent low a fine morning was a possibility.

The storm raged until dawn and with an eerie yellow light the new day announced itself. It was raining heavily, as it had been since yesterday afternoon. I checked the radar again: an intense red-looking super cell type system was still just inland from Lennox Head, moving slowly NE along what I thought was the retreating flank of a low cell stalled just offshore.

At 7.25 I left the house as the rain briefly respited, looking to the north from my house I could see a bizarre wall cloud and heard a strange whining sound which I put down to a jet aircraft missing the runway at the nearby Ballina Airport. I drove up on the ridge behind the village behind the Point and a dead calm ensued. Looking to the north and west the skies were black. I thought, "Hmm that must be the edge of the storm cell"

In actual fact it was the remnants of the twin water-spouts/tornadoes which had just swept through the village.

I heard on ABC radio that a tornado had just swept the village and in disbelief I hopped in the Laser and headed into the village. "Tornado...what bullshit" I thought.

What I saw was hard to comprehend: brick houses ripped apart, roofs and metal everwhere, boats sent flying and scattered everywhere, houses crumpled like a a Beirut bomb had gone off, fences draped across powerlines. Caravans piled up on top of each other like a demented blancmange. It was truly shocking.

I spent the morning gutting the house of a friend who was at home with her two daughters when the twister hit. They heard a sound like a plane landing and then in seconds the tornado hit their home, smashing the windows, ripping the roof off the house and throwing the terrified girls around the house as they clung to each other screaming.

The house is totalled. Others are too. It's a miracle no-one was seriously hurt.

Hindcasting the event, the vorticity and instability in the boundary layer between the inland super cell and advection/convergence in the offshore low enabled the tornado, estimated at an F1 or F2 system to form, and move onshore. Waterspouts are common along the coast this time of year, but waterspouts moving onshore as fully fledged tornados has not been fully documented to the writers knowledge.

The town is in shock and people are homeless. I couldn't help but think, surveying the chaos and destruction, if this was the start of a climate-change induced turning away from the sea and beachfront property.

Click here to see the radar loop for yesterday morning. Note the area of red developing between Ballina and Byron Bay.