With Cyclone Kirrily set to make landfall around 11 pm just north of Townsville, and with a heatwave in the diagonally opposite corner of the state, there’s no shortage of dangerous weather in and around Queensland this Thursday.
- Temperatures were forecast to reach 49°C out at Birdsville in the southwest corner of the state, and the mercury got there with a bit of extra mayo, with a reading of 49.4°C just after 2:30 pm.
- That made it the 2nd-highest Queensland temperature ever recorded, just shy of the 49.5°C scorcher on Christmas Eve, 1972, which also occurred in Birdsville.
Birdsville is a tiny map speck of 100 hardy residents, best known for its famous bush races in later winter or early spring, an event which swells the town’s population to 6000.
Here at Weatherzone, we actually wrote a story about the first day of the Birdsville races being called off in 2022 due to heavy rain.
There were plenty of images of mud-spattered locals and visitors that day, but today, the town was its typical dusty self.
Image source: iStock.
Meanwhile temperatures should cool down a little in Birdsville on Friday with a top of 46°C predicted and a further cooling trend into the weekend with top temps closer to average for January – which means around 40 degrees.
But the heat will push eastwards with large parts of southern, central and eastern Queensland, as well as northern and eastern parts of NSW, in line for a heatwave.
Brisbane will be pretty much in the bullseye of the heatwave, as you can see on the map below.
Source: BoM.
Che
This normally dry 
