OK, we’ll also likely see showers and storms Friday and possibly Sunday, but too good to miss the chance for three stormy Saturday posts in a row! We’ve got an active MJO to the north of Australia, so a heap of moisture up that way…and then winds pushing down across Eastern Aus from the tropics:

We’d usually expect to see humidity rolling in more directly from the ocean, but this time around the winds are taking a longer route to get here…but they’ll still have a heap of moisture at low and mid levels when they do. We can see the humidity move in on this animation through to the end of Sunday:

As you can see our lovely refreshing dry air gets pushed away, then tries to make a move back in at the end of the weekend…And the spring sunshine combined with high humidity levels kicks off a heap of showers and storms through the weekend:

Add in the forecast lightning through to the end of Sunday and we can see those showers will contain a decent amount of thunder and lightning:

We may even see some early showers tomorrow morning close to the boundary between the different air masses. As always these are showers and storms. Just as with last Saturday where we managed to miss the worst of them (with damage reported to our north and south) there is always a chance we’ll miss out again – however with multiple rounds likely to move across NE NSW from Friday through Sunday there’s a good chance we’ll catch more than we did last weekend.

No real changes in the other drivers at this time but worth flagging the hot house that is the Coral Sea right now – temps well above normal – not a good sign as we head into summer. Here’s the current anomalies:

…and here’s the East Australia Current starting to push some of that really warm water further south:

….going to watch that one – if the current La Nina-ish pattern persists this can help power significant rains (and humidity) as we head into our summer…