How Do You Want Your Capping?
Rare or Well Done?

December 31, 2001 &
January 1, 2002

I had to After a few hours sleep, I woke up just after 10am and jumped in the shower.  Coming out of the shower, radar showed thunderstorms redeveloping again in the eastern Downs and on the ranges.  We headed out once again!  Our main concern that storms were developing much earlier today so might flatten out into rain, which sort of did happen – and sort of didn’t!

We headed out towards Amberley and then to Rosewood where we stopped by the side of the road – the storms were extremely lightning active (and so they should have been I guess considering LIs were –10 to –12 and CAPE was up to 5000!)  We were seeing heaps of CGs along the edge of the storm, and there was the constant flickering of lightning – almost like strobe lightning in the daytime!  Needless to say, static was beyond constant!

We sat on the edge, the storms were slowly moving towards us – it had a weak gusterish type outflow region on its edge, we got some heavy rain and squally winds (no stronger than 25knots though). 

We tried to keep up with this cluster, but it became difficult to locate it with thunderstorms developing all around.  We ended up heading back into Brisbane before doing a loop and heading back out to Rosewood and watching weak storms around the place.  It was a disappointing end to a day really – the cap was way too weak and things were going up too quickly so it became cluttered with widespread showers and thunderstorms everywhere!  We decided to go to the Walloon Pub for a New Years Eve steak, before I had to go and meet up with my parents later on that evening, and also for New Years lunch on the following day.  Not before getting an OK little sunset first though!

I had New Years lunch with my parents - but that finished around 1pm - I phoned Tony and said that I'd meet him at Warrill View lookout (his last day in Queensland).  Unfortunately, Tony was going to experience three different levels of capping.  Good capping (Sunday), weak capping (Monday or yesterday), and strong capping (today) - some CJs and weak storms went up on the far eastern Downs but unfortunately they couldn't persist through the cap.