Severe Weather Update: Wind And Rain For Southern Aus

Once that's cleared, we will finally see the end of what has been a wet and woolly week in southern areas, heading towards a finer weekend.

I'm Angus here at the Bureau of Meteorology. This is a severe weather update for the 2nd of July.

We will start off by looking at a couple of bands of rain over the last day or two.

Big band of rain yesterday, some thunderstorms embedded in that, crossing New South Wales, Victoria, northern Tasmania as well.

That one is now clearing out into the ocean, and we've got this next band with the next cold front moving onto the country.

This one's not quite so well defined, and the rainfall is not as heavy with this one, but certainly still seeing some top-up rainfall along this axis here.

And the combination of these weather systems has brought a wet week to parts of the south-east.

These are some rainfall numbers that we've picked up on our weather stations across the south-east. Forty-eight-hour rainfall totals here, from 10:00 am Tuesday to 10:00 am Thursday.

The largest numbers up around northern Victoria, 132 mm at Mount Buffalo, about 90 mm around Falls Creek and across the state border into New South Wales at Thredbo there.

For South Australia, over 100 mm have been recorded around parts of the Mount Lofty Ranges east of Adelaide, and we've had over 50 mm in Adelaide itself, a very wet start to July there, and about 30 mm in the Eyre Peninsula.

For Tasmania, it's been wet across the north of the state, with the largest accumulations being at Mount Barrow in the north-east.

And we actually did see rain extend a good way northwards yesterday, up to 50 mm being recorded on the Central Tablelands of New South Wales around Orange.

That's led to some flooding across the south-east, because all that rain has to go somewhere. It can't all soak into the ground.

It ends up flowing down into the rivers and of course, those river levels will start to rise, and that gives us this patchwork quilt of Flood Watches and Flood Warnings across southern areas.

At the moment, we've got two Moderate Flood Warnings in Victoria, for the Kiewa River and for the King River across northern parts.

There are several more Minor Flood Warnings, shown in green across northern Victoria, southern New South Wales and north-eastern Tasmania.

And of course, the purple areas on this map are Flood Watches.

These are regions where the flooding might not be occurring at the moment, but there's still a chance that it could occur because there is more rain on the way.

So, if you do live on or near waterways in these parts of the country, stay up to date with the warnings over the next couple of days because they'll no doubt be added to, adjusted and edited as we track where the rain falls and how that affects the rivers.

Speaking of the next few days, this is what's going to happen as this next cold front crosses the south-east.

It's moving in much the same direction that the last few cold fronts have moved, not quite as quickly as yesterday's weather system, but still making some good speed eastwards today, bringing widespread showers, cold temperatures and, perhaps most significantly, a risk of damaging winds.

And that's where we've got our warnings in place, with damaging wind gusts possible across parts of three different states. And we have got the three different warning areas.

There is a Damaging Wind Warning for the south-east coast of South Australia around Robe.

Winds there are expected to be strong from Thursday evening into Friday morning, where we could see gusts over 90 km/h.

There's an Alpine Wind Warning for north-eastern Victoria and southern New South Wales.

Those winds could be even stronger in the mountains, up to 110 or 120 km/h, and that could occur really at any stage of the day on Thursday and into Friday morning.

It should be subsiding by around lunchtime tomorrow.

Finally, there's a warning a little further east for the eastern side of the ridgeline that's affecting parts of the south-east coast and parts of the southern Illawarra in New South Wales.

Really windy there through Thursday and into Friday morning, and potentially it's not until Friday afternoon that the strongest of those winds will subside.

So, those are our warnings, but there's a couple of other things I want to give you a heads-up on as well.

The first is we've got some really cold air, shown by the pinks and the greys, moving in behind our cold front at the moment.

That's likely to deliver some snowfall to alpine parts of Tasmania, Victoria and southern New South Wales.

We could see between 10 and 30 cm of snow up in alpine areas in the next 36 hours.

Alongside the snow, we've also got the potential for some really hazardous conditions on the water, some big, big waves hitting the coastline of South Australia, also western Victoria, pushing towards western Tasmania as well.

The main area of concern here looks to be the far south of the South Australian coastline.

Along this stretch here, we could see massive waves 8 to 10 m in size, coinciding with already pretty high tidal levels.

That will make for some really hairy conditions on the water out there. So, take care on and near the coastline over the course of the next few days.

And speaking of the next few days, let's see how this is likely to evolve through Friday and into the start of the weekend. The main cold front moves out to the east.

There will still be some further showers through the day on Friday, cold conditions as well, but we'll see those winds slowly dialing back. And by Saturday, well, some good news.

High pressure moving into the Bight. That's really going to settle the weather pattern across this part of the country.

So finally, it will be a brighter, calmer and clearer few days from about Saturday onwards. But still a couple of days to get through first.

So through the next few days, if you want information on the warnings or the flooding, or even just to check out your local forecast, you can find all of that weather info on the Bureau's website and the BOM Weather app.

Thank you so much for watching. Stay safe and have a nice afternoon.