Stormy, Wet Weather to Hit Much of Australia This Week

And I want to start off with this exact map right here. This is our rainfall accumulation map. I've pushed it out through until the end of the weekend.

So this is about the next six days' worth of rainfall, really highlighting the extensive wet weather to come. Even if we look at this map and ignore the lower end of the scale around the blues and the greens, just focus on the yellow, orange and red areas. We can see there is a lot of rain to come over the course of several days, with a couple of key areas in particular that I want to focus on.

The first is this region here. This really stands out on the map here. Heavy falls around the NEC area, north-east New South Wales, south-east Queensland. We sometimes call that NSW/QLD border region. We could see 50 to 200 mm of rain here in the next few days. That's a pretty broad range. The reason for that is the amount of thunderstorms which are forecast, which bring variable rainfall totals.

It's not just rain out towards the coast either, which could be of concern. This region here up through the Maranoa, Warrego and towards the west of Queensland, also forecast to get another whack of rain and it has already been really wet there in the past week. So that's certainly an area we're watching closely.

And another one down here, eastern Victoria and across the border into southern New South Wales, likely to pick up quite a bit of wet weather over the next few days as well.

That's going to give us a few wet weather impacts here. Some of our key watch points. The main one, of course, with that rain coming in, is flooding, with both main types of flooding possible over the course of this week. That means flash flooding. That's when the rain just comes down too fast to drain away or soak into the ground and it starts to accumulate.

Initially that just looks like puddles, but if it keeps raining, that can quickly turn into areas of flooding.

As well as that, we could see riverine flooding. We get lots of rain over a large area. Maybe it doesn't flood in all of those areas, but the rain flows into the river. There's a lot of water landing in the river.

Once the water level rises and the river bursts its banks, sometimes a long way away from where that rain initially fell. We also expect some pretty dangerous driving conditions, water over roads, slow going and detours, and with thunderstorms in the mix. It's not just rainfall, but we could see some damage from large hail or damaging wind gusts as well.

So that's the what. Now let's take a look at the why is this happening? And to do that I'm bringing up this map here. We don't show this one all the time. This is called precipitation water. This map shows us where or how much water is in the atmosphere available for rain.

And typically across Australia we get high values, pinks and purples, sometimes even those bright whites up in northern Australia. But for central and southern parts, we're more often at this end of the scale down the greens and the browns without that much precipitation water around.

But this week we've got these two big tongues of precipitation water plunging southwards from the north to some central and southern parts of the country, providing tons of moisture in the atmosphere. So when it does rain, that rain can come down pretty heavy.

Let's go day by day, focusing on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Three really key days for this wet weather event. Tuesday's map has got areas of rain all over the shop around this Queensland area across the border into New South Wales, also around the SA border, as well as large parts of Western Australia.

Now thunderstorm map, well, that is lighting up all the colours of the rainbow almost. We've got a very bright and colourful map here. In particular, I want you to focus on the yellow regions where we've got our severe thunderstorm risk possible. That's been assessed by our expert forecast team this morning, no less than four distinct areas where we could see severe storms.

The main risk with storms today will be these small pockets of really heavy rainfall that leads to that flash flooding that I talked about earlier. But up in the north-west, we could also see some damaging winds and some hail.

And in fact, earlier today there's already been some hail reported at Exmouth, which is right up in the far north-west corner of the country. Remarkable spot that actually hail there all that often, but it shows the power and intensity of these storms pushing into tomorrow.

The focus for Wednesday really becomes Queensland. That becomes our main area, with heavy rain and storms expected tomorrow, particularly inland parts of Queensland. And as I jump to tomorrow's thunderstorm forecast, take a look at those big red areas over central and western Queensland.

Severe thunderstorms here, not just possible. Severe thunderstorms looking likely there tomorrow. Likely to occur around the area pushing up towards Longreach.

So our main district, the Maranoa, Warrego, the Central West and the South West of the state for where those storms could occur. But more broadly speaking, large parts of Queensland, northern New South Wales, Northern Territory and Western Australia could also see another stormy afternoon.

Now we shift focus to Thursday, a little bit of a different flavour to Thursday. We might not see as many thunderstorms, but we are likely to see a ton of rainfall through this area here.

Widespread, significant and persistent falls for northern New South Wales and south-east Queensland looks like at the moment the heaviest falls probably likely to be between Newcastle and Rockhampton, where we could see some decent accumulations, certainly 50 to 100 mm possible on Thursday alone.

Isolated areas could even see more than that, the thunderstorm map not lighting up quite as brightly. Thursday might be a day where it's more persistent, ongoing rainfall, but potentially it could be the biggest day of the lot.

So it's going to be a very active week. Keep your eyes peeled for changes to the forecast, or any warnings that could get issued through the next several days. You can find that latest and up-to-date information on the Bureau's website and the BOM Weather app. We'll keep you updated here on social media as well. Thanks for watching.