Capital White-Out

I don't think I've ever experienced a storm quite like it. Even the biggest & baddest storms in Brisbane don't quite compare.

I'd watched it roll in from my balcony in Kingston for about an hour, then thought it was all show when only a few drops spattered down. I even jotted down a note to prompt some research for this weekend's show: "Is there a special name for a storm that's all thunder & lightning but no rain?". I pondered too soon; the wind picked up, there were bolts of lightning every few seconds and it bucketed down (& check out that radar image from the BOM - black!).

Then the eerie calm came...

...but it was not too long before the first twack, thwackthwack, thwackthwackthwackthwackthwackthwackthwackthwackthwackthwackthwackthwackthwack
thwackthwackthwackthwackthwack (etc etc) of hail pelted down and blanketed the city.

The Canberra Times online coverage is pretty average, but the ABC Canberra site has a good collection of photos of the aftermath. There were so many pictures flying around on email today; most government email servers would have had their work cut out for them. Most have them had been posted to flickr by lunch time. The most spectacular were these of the storm from Yass.

The ice was still in piles around Civic this afternoon. Apart from the ice in this defoliated courtyard in this picture, I saw the remains of the snowman at The Avenue and hail piled up at least a metre in a stairwell leading to an underground carpark.

Hopefully we'll get to interview Kenn Batt from the BOM on this weekend's Fuzzy Logic.

UPDATE: Chris' office didn't fare well.

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