Multiple rain rounds for the southeast, but a drier turn is coming

Another well timed upper low and trough working through a warm and moist airmass triggered by a positive SAM phase continues to headline the week of weather ahead.

Rainfall looks to be a higher chance over the weekend and more likely next week, over large areas of VIC, NSW/ACT and through to southern QLD with the focus of the heaviest rainfall covering large areas of the Food Bowl. This event does appear to be further east of SA this time around.

A strong cold front on Friday over southwest WA has brought a decent dump of rain to coastal areas and follow up rainfall continues this weekend in areas exposed to the west to southwest flow as a low moves south of the state.

That cold front as it weakens and reaches SA during Sunday will invigorate the trough over eastern Australia and this is where the rainfall becomes more widespread. Next week, multiple rounds of rain and storms are forecast for the southeast inland of the nation.

A colder blast of weather that impacts WA from early next week with another front will spread into the southeast of the nation later next week.

The unusual warmth is in response to the strong positive Southern Annular Mode setting, this suppresses the westerly wind belt influence and allows for the easterly wind bearing to be more of a feature. This also keeps the long duration cold outbreaks at bay. There is little change to the SAM setting over the next 7 days. For wet weather spread, we have to rely on these cut off lows being in place. Without them, we would have been a lot drier. So counting our blessings this week heading into a drier turn from mid to late July.

El Niño has been declared in the ocean, but the atmosphere is yet to couple with that setting, and so we have not got an El Niño influence on the weather pattern across Australia just yet.

I will have more next week.

Karl Lijnders is the founder of Weather Matters, which provides short, medium and longer-range weather forecasts, updated daily, with a focus on Australian ag and what the weather and climate means to you.

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