Parts of Sydney and south-west New South Wales faced elevated fire danger on Friday as high winds and unseasonably warm temperatures pushed through south-eastern Australia before a cooler, more settled weekend.
New South Wales, Victoria, south-west Queensland and parts of central Australia experienced temperatures between 6C and 12C above average on Friday, with damaging wind warnings for parts of New South Wales and Victoria.
Some parts of Sydney had reached temperatures of 28.8C by midday on Friday, while Melbourne was experiencing a balmy but windy 24.5C.
Wind gusts reached up to 126km/h on Friday in alpine areas of NSW and winds were blowing steadily at more than 100km/h in parts of Gippsland.
Christie Johnson, senior meteorologist at the Bureau of Meteorology, said the wind was expected to peak around lunchtime on Friday before moderating before the weekend, as a cold front began to pass through.
“There’s rainfall with this front that’s moving across,” Johnson said. “It’s not particularly heavy rainfall through South Australia, NSW, Victoria, but over Tassie is probably where the heaviest rainfall is likely to fall.”
While the rain was not expected to be heavy in Tasmania, it would be falling on already waterlogged and flooded areas.
“The catchments are saturated, the ground is saturated, and so any rainfall is going to run straight into the rivers,” Johnson said. “So we are expecting further flooding, minor to moderate flooding through parts of particularly northern Tasmania, but also through some parts of the south as well.”
Some low-lying parts of Tasmania could experience small hail or snow on Friday night before another cold front that would cross Tasmania on Sunday but bring rain mainly to the west.
While above-average temperatures on the mainland were expected to persist in parts of Queensland and north-east NSW, milder and more settled conditions were expected on the mainland for the weekend, with cooler temperatures closer to average and a small amount of rainfall, Johnson said.
