Firstly a HUGE thank you to locally based IT Business Snapfrozen for offering to host the Bellingen Weather website and blog. As the site has grown we were struggling to find affordable and efficient hosting – then Snapfrozen jumped in and offered to host us. Local organisations supporting each other – thanks again guys. You should now find the site much faster and with a much better uptime.

Could be a good time too – there is some more fire weather on the way before a chance of some rain early next week. Unusually the fire weather is likely to come about from north easterly winds blowing in. They’re common along the east coast during late Spring and Summer…but what is not so common is the combination of such dry conditions and a significant number of fires burning along the NE NSW coast. Here’s the current fire map as of early this morning:

Here’s the current preliminary (BoM generated) forecast fire weather over the next 4 days – you can see the NE winds increasing the risk as we head in the latter part of the week:

This is NOT the offical fire forecast – please always use the RFS site for the official fire forecast.

But there is some light on the horizon – a significant area of tropical moisture is moving south through Queensland right now, and that moisture is looking like it is going to interact with a front moving across on Monday, bringing the potential for some more widespread rain. Here’s how the accumulated rainfall looks from today through the middle of next week – you can see showers and storms across inland Queensland in the wetter air, and then see a front move in from the south west, interact with that air and bring rain across much of NE NSW:

Worth noting that (1) there are only forecast totals (2) the event is some way off (3) we are east of the divide so could well see a lot less than areas to the west (4) some models are giving us significantly less (while others give us more)….however it’s great to see moisture coming into play. I’ll post more about likely totals closer to the time. In the meantime we’ve still got dry fire weather for some days to come – take care out there.