Christmas day, from my front porch, Melbourne - this storm front came through mid/late afternoon bringing with it high wins and baseball size hailstones in some areas, thankfully much smaller where we are. My brother in law a few miles west of us had 4 cars including 2 uninsured classics that he is restoring pounded by 3-4 inch size hailstones, 20-30 large dents in each - ouch! we just copped some flooding in the yard and yet another new patio umbrella trashed by the Melbourne weather. But it didn't spoil our day.

[vievetrick]

Scary but cool shot

[bluestringer]

Nice catch. Looks almost like there is a funnel cloud in the distance.

[paulh]

Yikes - that looks & sounds a lot like our Spring storms here in Texas. I also know what it's like to have a car pounded by giant-sized hail Nice shot.

[tim60]

Great picture that conveys what the news did not. When I watched the news after going out all day I heard about the tornado west of Melbourne. That was part of this storm. Australia very rarely gets tornados - so one on Christmas day is quite something. Glad I live in Adelaide. It was 35C and still, except for a bit of rain in the morning. For those far away, Melbourne gets much more rain and storms than the rest of the south of Australia.

[Bob Harris]

wonderful photo of lowering sky, you just never know what to expect.

[mclarenman01]

Nice pic Cee Cee!

I was stuck on the Calder Freeway when one of the hail storms came through. Copped quite a lot of 1-2 inch hail. Enough to make a pretty good mess of my car but not enough to break the windshield like some people had :S

Here is a quick shot looking bask at the stormfront after we escaped it

Attached Images

 

[Cee Cee]

thanks for the comments guys, since posting this morning and being out all day and just had a chance to catch up with the news, quite a few copped it pretty bad with flooding & hail damage, a 3ft wall of water rushing through the streets of Greensbourgh I believe, lots of images of damaged trees, houses & cars on the TV news. Makes my damage seem trivial, luckily Christmas dinner was well & truly cooked and consumed by this time.

mclarenman01, the Calder is not that far from here, so we could be looking at different ends of the same storm, sorry to hear of your car damage, the shot was at 4.30pm EDST.

[Bob Harris]

CC, here in the states they are reporting a cyclone will be hitting Australia, is this true, I didn't get a storm number of exactly where it was to hit.

[tim60]

Bob, the cyclone is on the other side of the country. Melbourne is in the south-east. The cyclone was up at Darwin, half-way along the north coast. They called it Grant. The news reports suggested that there was a lot of rain but not too bad damage. That is moving around up north. That hit late Christmas Day, which was a bit reminiscent of Christmas Day 1974 when Darwin was destroyed by Cyclone Tracey, with a significant number of deaths. That led to a near total evacuation of the city to the major cities in other states (all at least 1000 miles away) and new building standards which can withstand cyclones.
Official weather site: www.bom.com.au .
The bad weather in Melbourne was predicted to affect the Sydney-Hobart yacht race last night. That is a famously tough race.

[Cee Cee]

Bob, as tim60 says... Roughly 2000 miles Between Melbourne & Darwin I don't know if it had any influence on what happened down here. last year when cyclone Yasi (cat 5) hit the northern Queensland coast it pushed a whole lot of air around and was blamed for causing flash flooding in the state of Victoria (Melbourne is the capital of Victoria). I heard something on the news about extremely hot temperatures in central Australia with a lot of warm air being pushed down from the Nth west ( possibly the cyclone having that effect ) and meeting up with a cold front coming from Sth west.
I think storms in Melbourne can now clearly be predicted. Sure to follow within a week of me purchasing a new patio umbrella!

cheers.

[Bob Harris]

Bob, the cyclone is on the other side of the country. Melbourne is in the south-east. The cyclone was up at Darwin, half-way along the north coast. They called it Grant. The news reports suggested that there was a lot of rain but not too bad damage. That is moving around up north. That hit late Christmas Day, which was a bit reminiscent of Christmas Day 1974 when Darwin was destroyed by Cyclone Tracey, with a significant number of deaths. That led to a near total evacuation of the city to the major cities in other states (all at least 1000 miles away) and new building standards which can withstand cyclones.
Official weather site: www.bom.com.au .
The bad weather in Melbourne was predicted to affect the Sydney-Hobart yacht race last night. That is a famously tough race.

Bob, as tim60 says... Roughly 2000 miles Between Melbourne & Darwin I don't know if it had any influence on what happened down here. last year when cyclone Yasi (cat 5) hit the northern Queensland coast it pushed a whole lot of air around and was blamed for causing flash flooding in the state of Victoria (Melbourne is the capital of Victoria). I heard something on the news about extremely hot temperatures in central Australia with a lot of warm air being pushed down from the Nth west ( possibly the cyclone having that effect ) and meeting up with a cold front coming from Sth west.
I think storms in Melbourne can now clearly be predicted. Sure to follow within a week of me purchasing a new patio umbrella!

cheers.

Thanks to both for the information. Traveling fulltime in our RV as we do, the weather is very important to us. I remember when Katrina hit, we were 500 miles north of the coast and we just got flooded as it moved in. We just headed northwest out running the squall, but the winds and rain were nasty. I will take the earthquakes of California anytime over the hurricanes/cyclone and tornadoes anytime. We have had a couple of tornadoes touch down close to us and seeing the aftermath felt very fortunate they touched down a couple of miles from us. Stay safe and thanks so much for the information.