Dry today but we’ve got a couple of stormy days coming up. Below is an animation (at 3 hourly intervals) of the forecast lighting from tomorrow morning through Saturday night. You can see the forecast time in the bottom right hand corner:

You can see the storms develop quickly tomorrow lunchtime before dying out slowly overnight…then forming again through Saturday. No huge totals forecast from these storms but a heap of lightning…so always the risk of new fires starting (but also the hope that the storms can put out the fires already burning – for example if we get a decent storm over the headwaters it will certainly help with the Andersons Creek fire currently burning there). Forecast totals from the same model:

Highlighting the challenges faced when forecasting storms, the Australian model shows considerably less:

We’ll see a clearance come through overnight Saturday – and that clearance will introduce a few days with dry and gusty westerly winds before they slowly ease off again. The culprit? A combination of a long wave trough moving through SE Australia with the SAM plunging back into strongly negative territory again:

We should see the SAM and the IOD weaken as we head through summer, increasing the chance of receiving some decent rain…however they are still in place at the moment – so the seasonal outlook just released by the BoM could be better, with hotter and drier than average conditions being forecast: