We’ve had a dry few weeks – and the combination of some windy weather, dry air and the sun growing stronger has meant an increasing risk of fires….which we’ve seen with a big fire up the Kalang and smaller fires popping up elsewhere across our region.

The good news is that we should see some less-dry weather over the next week or so. The first chance of rain comes with a change moving through over the next 48 hours. It will bring some showers, more particularly against south facing slopes, which for us means the Dorrigo / Coffs range. Here’s the forecast rainfall radar until midnight tomorrow:

Once that change moves through we’ll pick up some warmer weather ahead of the next change that will move in late week. In the forecast charts below you can see the warmer northerly winds move in ahead of the change, with a low likelyto develop over the NSW inland late week in response to the cooling uppers. That will swing winds onshore for some lucky regions with showers developing late week for some – though where exactly is still up in the air:

All this comes together to bring the chance of wetter weather than we’ve seen recently. Even if we don’t see much rain, increased humidity levels will keep it feeling a little damper than it has recently, and will hopefully clear some of the smoke that has been dropping into the valleys overnight. Forecast 8 day rain totals looking like this right now:

You can see the focus on the Coffs range. As the late week change draws closer I’ll post again if it looks like we’ll see any decent totals. Longer term the models are still trending wetter. The animation below shows how much wetter or drier each month is looking for August through November. You can see how the model (accurately) predicted drier than average conditions along the coast through August, but then forecasts conditions to be a little wetter than average from September through November – we will keep our fingers crossed:

Images via Meteologix and Tropical Tidbits. Animations created by Bellingen Weather.