Lots of storms inland over the last few days. Here’s a lightning map showing how many strikes have been recorded over the last 72 hours – pretty impressive – but as forecast there was very little closer to the coast:

Despite the storms inland we didn’t see much coming into our catchments – and the Bellinger is back down into record low territory with a flow of 2.3ML/day:

Looking similar on many other local rivers. Here’s a photo of the Kalang taken over the weekend – no flow at Duffys Bridge:

So what is coming up? Warming up quickly in town today ahead of a change moving through this evening. That change (by way of a trough) is going to generate some strong storms across much of NSW today, with the south and inland seeing the worst of it. On the animation below you can see storms form on the change mid-morning, strengthen through the arvo before weaking this evening as the trough moves closer to us…so still a chance of a storm or two later on this arvo and into this evening, but likely not as much rain as further south and inland:

Once this change moves through we’ll be into a few drier days, before the next change moves in. The next change is an interesting one. It’s a more westerly change and will last on and off for a number of days as a long wave trough moves through to our south:

Westerly changes usually mean much drier weather – and we will likely see that at times…but this change will, at least initially, be coming up against some much wetter air from up north, so we’ll likely see a band of showers and storms form along that boundary late week and over the weekend…and fingers crossed we get to see some reasonable totals from it before the dry air wins out. Here’s how the models see it:

You can see some totals today as the change moves through, then a couple of dry days before the chance of more decent falls over the weekend…but then when the dry air wins out we go back to very dry weather with no rain forecast by any models. I’ll post again as we get closer to the weekend – and in the meantime let’s hope we get to see some storms and good falls today as the change moves through – but no new fires from lightning!

Photos: BoM / Tropical Tidbits / Edan Doye / Meteologix. Animations by Bello Weather