Hope you enjoyed the weekend sunshine…because we’ve got more showers likely to roll in over coming days. The reason? We’ve got well above average ocean temperatures just offshore…and winds are turning onshore. You can check out the ocean temperatures and anomalies below:

One of the reasons we’ve got such warm waters just offshore is because the East Australia current is pumping:

….and that current is drawing warmer water down from an even-more-above-average Coral Sea:

That is some seriously warm ocean for this time of year! Needless to say those ocean temperatures are easily high enough to generate some decent showers, which will feed onshore at times over the coming week. We won’t see rain all the time, and we’ll likely see some decent sunshine as well…Forecast radar for the coming week shows bands of showers moving in at times, with some decent drier spells inbetween:

….and resultant forecast rain totals over the coming week look like this:

Looks like the highest falls will be just offshore…likely as overnight offshore land breezes (off a cooling land) run up against prevailing onshore winds. Could be some awesome cloud formations early morning if, like me, you’re into that stuff 🤓

Rain totals should remain on the reasonable side, but with such warm anomalies sitting just offshore there’s always the chance of some higher falls if a surface trough forms close to the coast. We’ll keep an eye on that one.

Looking further ahead and models appear to be closing in on a warm neutral Pacific pattern into our summer:

This would likely bring warmer and a little drier conditions to our part of the world as we head into spring and summer, but we’re at the time of year when it’s hard to know exactly where we’ll head as we move through winter – small changes in Pacific patterns now can have big outcomes in months to come. We get an idea of that chaos when we look at the spread of likely outcomes…Most sit just on the warm side of neutral but spread from cool neutral through to El Nino. I’ll update again as we move into winter and models settle down.

That’s it for now. Thanks for reading 🙂