plummet wrote:The sqaul lines that come through here for the most part are very obvious. The repeatable squalls which are generally smaller in size, say several km wide, stand out like dogs balls. they are generally stand alone with no other cloud mass. they generally travel at the wind speed.
That is good, some folks in temperate areas say squalls are sometimes obscured in preexisting cloud cover? I haven't seen it much myself, even when it is overcast, the squalls usually set themselves apart with darker clouds if nothing else.
plummet wrote:
I spent an entire 24hrs dodging these sqaulls in 25-40+knots when i set my 24hr landboarding distance world record. I was on a beach 50km long and you could actually kite upwind/downwind and miss them or only strike the side of them. the night time leg proved to be difficult as you couldn't see them coming. But you could sence them as the wind would shift and increase, then the rain would hit. by that stage it would be cranking 40+. You had a couple of mins to park the kite at the edge of the window depower it and brace yourself. That day was singlarily the most insane thing i have every done.
That was one extreme landboarding run! I was just watching a guy pulled off an edge in high gusts in the Ragnarok video. So, they guy gets pulled through a serac zone breaking off ice with his body?! I imagine something similar, or worse happens along the beach. It is nice to smash into water when that happens and nothing harder. Although as pointed out earlier in this thread water can be more than hard enough at speed to mess you up.
plummet wrote:
The types of squalls that aren't that repeatable are the larger ones. maybe 10-20km plus in size. they can do the strange thing you mention in your post. switch the wind, double it, kill it. straingly locally these squall types generally travel slower than the wind. sometimes they can hover offshore for some time before reaching land, other times they disapate and don't even make it...... But you can still see them even with other cloud around.
I don't recall that uplift lofting you talk of. We did have a death the day before christams lastr year of a landboarder. he was kiting in an area close to 700m hills. The wind was gusty and coming off the land and the mountains. He was lofted some 30 meters high and traveled over 1km in the air hitting tree's in the process. i am not sure if it was the trees or thehitting the ground that killed him. either way it was a tradgedy. There is a possibility that an updraft could have been involved in that. but from my research it sounds like he was on a kite far to big for the conditions
That was a bad one in Nelson. Do you know what size and type kite he was flying and does anyone have a wind speed estimate? I recall there was some confusion early on that it happened while he was kitesurfing.