Today has been dubbed "Rotatorfest" by Anthony Cornelius due to the large number of rotating thunderstorms along eastern NSW. The setup was fantastic for supercells. An upper low early morning located just west of Melbourne moving NE towards Sydney/Hunter. This produced a strengthening jetstream right over central NSW of 100-110 knots. A surface trough was also present, bringing in moist NE winds. The trough line was set to fire with the upper low approaching and associated cold pool, jetstream and good surface moisture and low level inflow. The sky was cloud free in the morning. Storms lasted all night off the coast and still going strong early morning. Area's of fog were around in the valleys but soon burnt off. Surface temps reached around 30-32 degrees.

I headed out at about 1:30pm after finishing up some morning work. My original plan was to head for the hunter with Brisbane chaser Anthony Cornelius. However as things were looking rather excellent in Sydney town. So i decided to head for the area north of Blacktown, into some of the rural areas east of Richmond/Windsor.

I spotted an excellent cell on radar before i left, which prompted me to head north. This cell was so large it consumed most of the NE sky as i neared it. After about 25 minutes getting quite nervous, trying to find a suitable lookout, i stumbled upon a great view Vineyard.

I was greeted by a truly magnificent cell. The whole cell seemed to be exploding on the back end and the anvil stretched out far to be ENE. After snapping some photos, i decided to head around to the West to try and catch a better perspective of this beast.

Luckily i found a super lookout in Box Hill, not far from Vineyard. From here i watched this cell in all its glorious wonderment. Sections of the storms just kept errupting from the back end as well as within the storm itself. Visible rotation was evident right throughout the whole storm as the corkscrewing congestus updrafts were bellowing from the main column.

The storm would anvil out, then burst though the formed anvil. It did this several times as i was watching it here. For the first time (but not the last) i was confronted by some rather nasty residents who verbally questioned me for my activity in front of their property. When i responed that i was chasing/photographing storms, they were quite nice.

The storm was still quite big in the sky. Even though at this stage it was far out to sea.