Weather update: Days of rain and storms across Australia

There is plenty of rain and a lot of storms in the forecast across Australia, not just today but for the next several days, which is why I’m here at the Bureau of Meteorology with a weather update.

Today is Wednesday, and let’s dive in and take a look at what we can expect over the next few days. Starting off with this map here. This is our total rainfall accumulation map.

We’ve let it run out to Sunday night. So this is really the next five days’ worth of rainfall.

And clearly eastern Australia sticks out brightly on this map, specifically this area here, northern New South Wales, southern and central Queensland, not just on the coast but also pushing up into the Tablelands, the Darling Downs and the Central Highlands.

This area is getting into the darker purple, showing us we could see 50 to 150 mm of rain here in the next five days, and since some of that is driven by storms, we’re likely to get isolated pockets which exceed that.

This is not the only area on the map with significant rain, though. Also parts of the south-east, including eastern Tasmania, central Victoria and even a few speckled areas through central South Australia could get some sizable rainfall totals.

Perhaps we’re more in the 30 to 60 mm range down here, but that is a noteworthy amount of rain for our southern states, including the southern capitals. Hobart, Melbourne certainly likely to get a few wet days ahead.

Adelaide a little bit more on the cusp, but could certainly see some significant rainfall in the near future as well. And with significant rainfall comes some wet weather impacts.

And these are our key watch points as we continue to head through this wet and stormy spell.

And of course, when we’re talking rainfall, the main impact is always going to be flooding, whether that’s flash flooding, which is when the local rainfall overhead is just too heavy to drain away, or that could be riverine flooding, where rain over a large area flows into a river.

Naturally, that water level is going to rise and it can burst its banks way downstream, sometimes tens or even hundreds of kilometres away from where that rain initially fell.

We’ve already started to see minor flooding occurring over central Queensland, and in the next several days, we’re likely to see other areas start to experience flooding.

Water over roads leads to dangerous travel conditions, as well as delays and detours. Lots of traffic on those wet days. So minimise travel where you can.

And there’s a possibility we could see power or other infrastructure issues. Just something to keep in the back of the mind for the next few days, particularly if severe weather does ramp up.

Let’s have a bit of a day-by-day breakdown starting with today. With Wednesday, areas of rain on our map through central Queensland, central Western Australia, southern Northern Territory and the east coast.

But when it comes to today, our main focal point is going to be that central Queensland area. And I think that’s a little bit more clear on our Severe Thunderstorm forecast for the afternoon.

In fact, let’s zoom in on this region here so we can see which areas are most at risk. The red part of this map is the top of the scale.

Severe thunderstorms are likely to occur throughout this area during this afternoon, so that extends from Longreach in the north across to Springsure, then all the way down to Cunnamulla and Thargomindah. That includes Charleville, Quilpie, Barcaldine and several other communities over the centre and the west of Queensland.

This area we could see severe thunderstorms that not only bring heavy rainfall, but could bring some large hailstones and some damaging wind gusts throughout the course of this afternoon and this evening.

More broadly through the yellow region, we also see a chance of that same activity in the likes of St George, Roma, Rolleston and Emerald.

And yellow tends to green out towards this east coast, which is where we just see some standard thunderstorms, not as likely to turn severe, but standard thunderstorms nonetheless, which could bring some briefly powerful weather.

Let’s take a look at tomorrow, because it’s a bit of a different flavour to what we expect to happen on Thursday.

Tomorrow, the wet weather is going to be less driven by thunderstorms, and instead it’s going to be more persistent. A widespread, ongoing rainfall throughout the day across the east coast, mostly north of Newcastle and south of Rockhampton.

This is our main area of focus for Thursday’s wet weather, where we could see hour after hour of rainfall through some of these eastern areas.

This is going to pile up and on Thursday alone we could see 50 to 100 mm land in the rain gauges through this eastern area, with isolated places getting even more than that.

There will be some thunderstorms tomorrow. They’re not as extensive or as widespread here is the map.

I think the key takeaway for Thursday: you could get heavy rain without any thunderstorms at all. That’s less likely for Wednesday.

I’m going to accelerate a little bit as we go through Friday and the weekend, just looking at the overall pattern on our maps for the next few days beyond Thursday, still large areas of rain and storms across our eastern states into Friday.

There is also this cold front in the Bight. Now that’s not really doing much on Friday. It’s staying out over those southern waters.

But when Friday turns to Saturday, we’re going to see this cold front move onto the country and start to tap into some of the moist environment which is persisting over eastern Australia.

And that’s going to cause this band of rain to build through South Australia into Victoria and into Tasmania on Saturday.

All the while, we’re continuing to see wet and stormy weather across this east coast.

On Sunday, it becomes a real soggy mess around large parts of the country as this cold front moves up and across Victoria, Tasmania and New South Wales.

More showers and storms ongoing for our eastern states. The rain is extensive on Sunday, many people having a soggy end to the weekend.

A little glimmer of hope at the end of the forecast period.

Once we get to Sunday night, we can see a high-pressure area building near South Australia through the first few days of next week.

This high is going to shove all of this rain and storms out to sea to the east of the country, and we should have generally a more settled weather pattern for next week.

Obviously that is several days away, so we’ve got lots of rain, lots of storms to keep an eye on throughout the rest of this week.

Keep up to date with any changes to the forecast, any warnings or any flood warnings which might be issued around your area on the bureau’s website and the BOM Weather app.

Thanks for watching.