Weather in the Berg 22-23 Nov 2014

Was anyone in the northern berg over the weekend 22-23 November 2014? There was some pretty unusual weather about - lots of deep tropical cloud that originated in Angola ended up over KZN and off the coast. Reports also of tornadoes near Dundee. Was the cloud base high? Was there rain and thunder?

I was in the far Southern Berg (Lady Grey / Tiffindell) doing the Skyrun. Not sure if the weather systems were the same, but we had clear weather on the morning of the 22nd, with a series of afternoon storms coming through from about noon. Then it settled into high cloud level overcast weather (clouds were still high above me at 2700m) in the late afternoon and into the night. High winds throughout the night with rain settling in at about 1am. Woke up to low cloud cover (base at ~2500m) and still raining.

Hope that helps.

I was in Parys (of all places) for most of the weekend - also quite far off the Berg, but we had beautiful clear weather till about midnight on Saturday at which point it began to rain. It rained solidly through the night till about 10AM on Sunday (at which point I was on my way to JHB). It then cleared up and weather was good in the afternoon.

There was apparently a monster hail storm yesterday in Howick - I hear that not all the hail has melted yet. I missed the storm by getting back to PMB around midday, but there were massive storm clouds visible in the late afternoon yesterday. And based on the view out of my window right now (in PMB), it looks like we are in for a big storm.

Not sure if that helps at all. If it is useful I do have some photos which include the skies around Parys on Saturday at midday and JHB around midday on Sunday.

Thanks very much for the details Stijn and Ghaz. Much appreciated.

I follow a landscape photographer by the name of Hougaard Malan. He was in the Northern Berg for over a week from about 16 Nov - 24 Nov. Weather is key to landscape photography so he was very aware of what was going on around him.
You can find a few cellphone snaps in his Facebook posts over the last week.

Here is the sequence of geostationary satellite images from the weekend, starting at 1900 on 21 Nov 2014.


midnight 22 Nov


0600 22 Nov


noon 22 Nov



1800 22 Nov


0600 23 Nov


noon 23 Nov


1800 23 Nov


The images are from one of my project sites
www.fennec.imperial.ac.uk/SA.shtml?date=2014/11/26%2019:00&date2=2014/11/26%2019:00
and are available every 15 minutes lagging real time by about an hour. Times are in UTC.

The images show deep, tropical convective cloud in dark red. The sequence shows the convection which begins somewhere in Angola, heading SE as part of a truncated tropical trough. It seems to become extratropical at the end of the sequence.

Here is an annotated image from noon 23 Nov 2014






This image is made mainly from thermal bands. In other words it is a map of temperatures. Deep cloud is tall cloud. Temperature decreases with height. The satellite sees the top of deep clouds as very cold and so we know they are deep. One advantage of thermal imagery is that it operates 24/7 whereas visible imagery shows nothing of interest weather-wise at night.

For equivalent visible image see below:


_Nov_2014.jpg[/attachment]

Here is a visible image from 6 Nov 2014 at 0745 UTC.

It the sort of day where you would wake up on the escarpment and look out over a sea of stratus clouds. The escarpment edge marks the limit of the cloud as the escarpment is higher than the cloud tops. Also the westerly wind blowing off the escarpment keeps clouds below escarpment height.


You can page through 15 minute sequences here
www.fennec.imperial.ac.uk/SA.shtml?date=2014/11/26%2019:45&date2=2014/11/26%2019:45
to find out what the weather was like over the course of your own trip. The archive goes back to Sept 2011