Morning in Dubbo again greeted us with 8/8 cloud cover and patches of drizzle.  A quick trip down to the library for a check of the sat pic, MSLA and a few models saw us heading west to try and get as close to the trough axis as possible (and out of this bloody rain).  Wind profile were fairly slack throughout so anything which developed was probably going to be fairly pulsey.  With the CB’s on, we headed off with Cobar in mind as out initial target area for the day. We were hoping that we’d be able to call in and get some up to date information from the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) at Cobar.  I was now in Anthony’s car and Greg and Matt were in Greg’s car.

 We headed west along the highway whilst listening to The Petshop Boys’- "Go West" (quite amusing).  By the time we’d reached Nyngan the sky was looking marginally better with Stratocumulus (StCu) now clearing ever so slightly.  Another 40km further west and the cloud cover was down to 4/8 and in the gaps we could see some nice TCu and even some weak convective showers to our SW and NW.  This showed some promise as it was only about 12:00pm and upon our arrival in Cobar at about 1:00pm we were greeted by a chunky TCu at the end of the main road into town. 

TCu going up near Cobar lookout.  Capture:  Andrew McDonald

 We grabbed some lunch from a local take-away place and headed up to the BoM.  We were greeted by Rob  who happily showed us some Thunderstorm outlooks for today and tomorrow and the latest sat pics and obs from around the state.

By about 1:30pm we’d finished at the BoM and a check of the sky revealed plenty of beefy showers around with nice dark rain-free bases (RFB) and lots of scuddy lowerings.  We headed out of town to the lookout, which is on the E side of town, and the views from there were perfect 360°.  Whilst driving up the access road to the lookout we noticed an extremely interesting tornado-shaped lowering under an RFB to our W.  We skidded to a halt and took some photos and some video of this 'thing' and watched until it dissipated.  Preliminary thoughts are that it was just scud but after some deliberation we haven’t ruled out the tornado factor (the debate continues).

Tornado.  Capture:  Andrew McDonald

Zoomed in on  tornado.  Capture:  Andrew McDonald

We sat up at the lookout for the entire afternoon watching TCu and Congestus (Cj) go up and drop some moderate showers but nothing developed further except for one lone Cb which was about 70km to our NW in unchaseable territory.  While no storms developed in our immediate vicinity, it was nice to get out of the Strato Cu and into some warm, moist air and see some convective clouds.   Temperatures hovered around 30C for most of the day and Dew Point’s (DP) were sitting on about 18C also.

We headed back into Cobar and booked a cabin for the night before ringing for our daily weather update from Dr Pearce (Matthew Pearce -  who was unfortunately unable to attend due to exams but acted as our model man for the entire trip and our enormous thanks go out to him).  The Doc had some good information for us for the following day.  The area to our N was looking fairly nice for the next few days with the trough slowly edging further east into slightly more chaseable territory and the winds were looking like at improving marginally each day for the next few days.  (The Doc also informed me that there were storms in Victoria which were apparently pretty good AGAIN - typical while I’m away!!)

TDU2K Day 4