A storm doesn't miss Mallacoota

 A contributor to the Mallacoota Community News Facebook Group posted a couple of images with the comment "Not in coota but close enough to scare our pets probably". The first image was produced by the BoM at 1618 hours.

Vic Roads republished this.

At 1839hrs the Mallacoota SES put a further post out, updating the BoM warning.  In effect the BoM filled in the bit they left out.

A snip from Blitzortung.com, at 1928 hrs shows that the fill-in was needed.

Snipping that to the Mallacoota area shows that the lightning strikes stopped almost at the Western shoreline of the Inlet.

I haven't got a precise count of the number of strikes (forgot to turn it on in Blitzortung, and Tempest.com is not showing the number of strikes yet) but the storm still shows in Blitzortung (at 0615 on 26 November it is about 350km SE of Mallacoota, level with Flinders Island) and is showing about 1200 strikes in the last 2 hours.

In terms of overall rainfall the BoM Airport site recorded 39.6mm between 1850hrs and 2030hrs.  The Gabo Island site recorded 16.2mm between 1936hrs and 2130hrs reflecting the edge of the storm being the Western shore of the inlet.  Other recordings around town included:

Nauta Tce 36mm

Clarke St  32mm

Angophora Dr (home) 28.2mm

The peak rain rate recorded at Angophora Drive was 152 mm/hr which is the 9th heaviest rate recorded since I started up in February 2019.  

The wind direction is interesting.  At home the wind direction was between NE and NW all day apart from the 2000hrs reading, during the storm, when it was from SW.  The BoM airport site shows a swing from NNW to WSW at 0700 remaining around SW until 0759 when CALM was recorded.  (That pretty much matches the records (every 10 minutes) from Clarke St.  Wind speeds showed gusts up to 50kph at the airport and 52 kph on Gabo.

In term of what may come down the River, the Bombala AWS site effectively missed out on all this excitement but had recorded 12.6mm by 0900hrs on 25th.  The month-to-date fall there is 51.8mm so there could be a little bit coming "down the pipe" especially if there is a fall inland in coming days.