Australia’s southeastern states experienced an early glimpse of spring-like thunderstorms on the weekend, with destructive winds, huge hail and more than a quarter of a million lightning strikes.
The interaction between two contrasting cold and warm air masses created the perfect environment for prolific thunderstorm activity over southeastern Australia on the weekend.
While this type of weather pattern typically causes large outbreak of storms in Australia’s southeast during spring, it’s unusual to see such widespread and violent thunderstorms in winter.
Video: Unseasonable thunderstorms spreading over parts of southern and southeastern Australia on the weekend.
Some areas in southeastern Australia have now had thunderstorms on more than three days so far this month, which is well above average for this time of year.
Images: The average number of thunderstorm days in Australia during August (top) and the number of storm days in the first 25 days of August this year (bottom).
Total Lightning Network detected more than 300,000 lightning strikes over southeastern Australia and surrounding waters on the weekend, with most of these occurring on Sunday. Impressively, lightning was detected above part of every Australian state and territory on the weekend.
Some of the thunderstorms that swept over southeastern Australia on the weekend were severe, producing large hail, damaging to destructive winds and large hail.
One storm in Vic dropped 3cm hail near Bendigo on Sunday afternoon, while another storm that evening generated a ferocious 150km/h wind gust at Mount Buller shortly after 6pm.
While the weekend’s thunderstorms have now cleared from southeastern Australia, further damaging winds are likely to develop on Tuesday and Wednesday with the passage of a strong cold front. Severe weather warnings have already been issued for parts of WA, Tas and Vic and will likely follow in some other states over the next 48 hours.
Another cold front later in the week may also bring another round of damaging winds to parts of southeastern Australia from Thursday or Friday.
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