Some beautiful showers and storms again yesterday around our region – we are truly blessed. Here’s an animation of the storms yesterday as the trough stalled right overhead:

…and here’s the resultant rain totals:

Once again a focus over the valleys with very little elsewhere across NE NSW. This follows on from recent trends that have given us good falls while other areas have missed out:

Looking further ahead, the main influences at this time are the Indian Ocean – which is forecast to remain colder than normal to the Northwest of Australia. This usually means drier than normal weather across much of SE Aus. The other key indicator for us is the Antarctic Oscillation. There has been a sudden stratospheric warming across the upper atmosphere about the South Pole. You can see how big the warming was below – the second image shows the extent of the warming through the atmosphere:

Normally we would expect that to generate a negative AAO at the surface – which would likely mean much drier than average conditions across Eastern Australia…but to date there is no sign of that happening….in fact the AAO has gone positive recently, resulting in the recent rains across our region. I’ve noted the changes on the chart below:

The surface is at the bottom of the chart (at the 1000hPa level). You can see the massively negative event up high – but it’s not connecting with the surface at this time. Only time will tell what will happen. The BoM believe it will make it down, but until it does we’ll likely keep the Spring showers and storms. Any impact is likely to be finished by the end of the year…so it’s a case of wait and see. The models think it’ll get drier – but that’s only a forecast and what’s happening across our (small) region is not showing that right now.