Ex-TC Narelle Moves Offshore Amid Severe Weather

Now, over the past 24 hours, ex-Tropical Cyclone Narelle has tracked across the northern Kimberley and is now moving into the Indian Ocean. We can see with these colours here that there is extensive banding with showers and thunderstorms in the vicinity of the low pressure system. Over the past 24 hours, we've seen some heavy falls and damaging wind gusts impacting the area, including a wind gust of 93km/h at Troughton Island, 166 mm of rainfall at Truscott and 146 mm at Kalumburu.

Moving forward, we have a number of warnings current. So starting with our Severe Weather Warning for heavy rainfall and damaging winds for the far north-western Kimberley expected during this afternoon. Moving forward, we are expecting that risk of damaging wind gusts to extend further down the coast, and some heavy falls are also possible about the coastal fringe.

So starting with this dark orange area, we're expecting damaging wind gusts to develop between Kuri Bay and Beagle Bay during Tuesday, extending down to Wallal and Port Hedland during Wednesday, and then all the way down to Exmouth during Thursday.

If we have a look at the track map, we'll see that ex-Tropical Cyclone Narelle will move offshore today and then rapidly intensify back into a tropical cyclone as it taps into the moisture from those warm tropical waters. It will move roughly parallel to the Pilbara coast and during the middle of the week, intensify back into a Severe Tropical Cyclone.

Once we head later into Thursday and Friday, we're expecting it to intensify further into a category 4 Severe Tropical Cyclone before curving around the Exmouth coast and making more of a south-westwards trajectory. So once we head into Friday and the weekend, there is a bit of a range of possible scenarios of where this system will track. It may cross the coast closer to the northern parts of the west coast of Western Australia, or it may linger offshore for a little bit longer and cross the coast further south between Geraldton and Perth during the weekend.

Either way, we are expecting significant impacts for the southern half of Western Australia, in particular heavy rainfall, and we're also likely to see areas of damaging wind gusts and coastal hazards such as large waves and coastal erosion.

If we have a look at the rainfall that we're expecting to accumulate over the next week, what we can see is that later in the week, we'll start to see these heavy falls through the southern half of WA, anywhere really between about Shark Bay and Bunbury, and also extending inland into the Wheatbelt.

So please keep up to date with our forecasts and warnings throughout the week as usual via the Bureau's website and app. Thank you very much for watching and we'll see you next time.