Widespread Rain to Hit South Australia From Thursday

Widespread rain and the risk of storms for much of Australia in the coming few days. I'm Angus here at the Bureau. This is a weather update. We're going to start off focusing on South Australia, because it's the first place to really get a taste of the rainy weather, but it will spread elsewhere over the next week or so. This map here is the total accumulated rainfall in the coming week, pretty much through until next Wednesday evening. And the main thing I want to show here, I don't want to dwell on it too much, but how extensive the rainfall is. Almost all of the country, aside from the north-western corner of Western Australia, in line for at least a bit of rain between now and next Wednesday, and for quite a lot of areas looking at these regions in orange, it's going to be more than just a drop or two. It's going to be some fairly substantial rain in the next few days. So let's break it down, see what some of the impact of this wet weather could be. And as always, if we do see the risk of heavy rainfall, it can lead to flooding in some parts of the country. That's definitely a possibility in the coming few days. And that can, of course inundate homes, properties or businesses. It can also lead to dangerous travel conditions if that water gets over roads, giving big delays or detours. And there's also going to be the potential for things beyond just the rainfall, as thunderstorms could bring damaging wind gusts or maybe some large hailstones.

Let's break down the next couple of days. Actually, we'll start off with today. And first we will look out in the west, because there has been rain in Perth this morning, about 15mm at the airport there over the last 12 hours, about 20mm in parts of Western Australia. But through Thursday we're expecting that rain to drift inland out towards the east. And by about midnight tonight or late on Thursday evening, take a look at this. It's almost like we've got three distinct bands of rain. This is the one that went through Perth this morning, followed up by another band in the south-west. But it's this preceding band here extending all the way up into the interior, which I want to focus on first. This band here is being fueled by tropical moisture from the Indian Ocean. That means we've got that humidity, that moisture moving its way over central Australia. And that is really what drives the potential for storm development. So when we look at our storm map for today, we see most of the colours focused around that east leading band of rain, including the risk of severe thunderstorms around parts of the Nullarbor and the interior, which could bring damaging wind gusts. It's a fairly sparsely populated place that could see that on Thursday, but that could change as we push into Friday.

So let's jump back to this map, and we'll watch the eastward progression of these bands of wet weather. We'll just ignore this one down in the far south-west for the time being, and take a look at the other two bands of rain. They sort of merge together during Friday morning, and once we get to about lunchtime on Friday or perhaps 2:00 in the afternoon, South Australia time, these two bands have just joined together. We're looking at one comprehensive, cohesive band of rain and thunderstorms across South Australia, bringing widespread weather during the second half of the day, including to Adelaide. As those two weather systems merge, we see the thunderstorm risk get a fair bit more extensive than it was the day before. And here's Friday's thunderstorm forecast map, much bigger yellow area. That's where those severe thunderstorms could occur. Now we know that severe thunderstorms can bring some pretty heavy rainfall from time to time, but could also bring large hailstones and damaging wind gusts through this yellow area from Alice Springs down through central parts of SA, down towards the Yorke and Ayre Peninsulas down here in the south. Adelaide, for the time being, is outside of the severe thunderstorm area, but we certainly expect some showers and the chance of a thunderstorm to move through Adelaide during the afternoon and evening on Friday.

All right, back to the map. I want to push this out into the weekend. We are going to see this band of rain actually pick up a bit of steam and start moving quite swiftly eastwards during Friday night and into Saturday, and then we'll see a bit of rain spread quite quickly across Tasmania during Saturda