Weather Alert: Wind, Rain to Ease This Weekend

This cloud band stretches from the tropical north through Queensland, across northeastern New South Wales, and then hooks back, covering Tasmania. We have seen some decent rainfall in the past 24 hours. In particular, I want to take a note of the blue and green dots on this map, showing where we've had between 10 and 50mm of rain in the 24 hours up to 9 am on Saturday morning. Fifty millimeters of rain in most parts of the country isn't enough to really get us worried about heavy rainfall warnings or the chance of major flooding, but it is a really good soaking into the landscape. It's good for agriculture, and it's particularly good for places that have been so dry through the year so far.

So it's positive to see those kinds of rainfall numbers across the South Australian peninsulas, around Adelaide, across the southeast, and over the border into western Victoria, where a number of locations have had between 15 and 30mm of rain. We've also seen decent falls over inland New South Wales, southwestern parts of Queensland, and the northern coast of Tasmania, where it has been raining through the morning so far.

There are still a couple of warnings in play with this weather system. Most of the warnings have now been cancelled as it approaches the east coast, and it's just on that weakening trend. But before we say goodbye to this frontal system, it will still bring some damaging wind to these areas: the northeastern ranges of Victoria, the Snowy Mountains of New South Wales, and the east coast of Tasmania. So if you're in or around these severe weather warning areas, you might still get a little bit of damage-potentially trees or branches coming down, which could damage cars or property.

Anyone up in the mountains, those strong winds overlapping with some snowfall at the moment, can lead to blizzard conditions up there, where the visibility is extremely poor with all that snow blowing around. It can be very dangerous to be out and about in that type of weather.

Through the remainder of the day today, we'll see this band of rain move eastwards across Queensland, southeastwards across New South Wales, and Tasmania. We could still see some heavy-ish falls around Tasmania over the next hour or two, but we anticipate that wet weather to really start to clear up before the end of the day on Saturday. Further north, the rain band will linger across parts of Queensland. It's a wet night in Brisbane tonight and actually wet really up to around about Mackay and maybe even up towards Townsville through the night on Saturday and into Sunday morning.

The rain will have cleared most of Tasmania by the end of the day today, but we do still have some flood watches and warnings in place for the state. We've got one moderate flood warning, a couple of minor flood warnings, and the big purple area that is our flood watch region, which basically covers all the rivers in the north and the east of Tasmania, all the way down to Hobart and the far south coast.

Before we wrap up, I wanted to highlight one other thing. This is the next incoming weather event that will impact Australia. So, the first one I've been talking about for the last couple of minutes is moving away during Sunday, but we've got this next cold front, which is going to move onto the west coast with a powerful band of rain, some strong winds, some thunderstorms, and some hail for western parts of the country on Sunday afternoon. That does include Perth, but let's play from Sunday through until Tuesday, and we'll watch this band of rain start to sweep eastwards again into South Australia, once again back into New South Wales, Victoria, and southern parts of Queensland on Tuesday next week.

This is going to be a follow-up spell of wet weather across the parts of the country that have just had a band of wet weather, and for most places, this will be another welcome spell of rain. The upcoming band of rain, which is likely to arrive during Monday and Tuesday next week, won't be as heavy as what we've just seen, but many spots could get another 5 to 15mm to really top up the wet weather they've just seen over the past 48 hours.

So, if you'd like to see how that could affect your area, find your forecast for the next few days on the Bureau's website or app. Thanks for watching. Have a great weekend.