First surge of heat set to spread across the country

We have a surge of cold air, rain and storms pushing across the southeast to end the week, then the focus turns to our first major surge of hot air for the season that will have an impact across the country. 

A complex area of low pressure is wandering near Tasmania. It’s slow, as it began its wander on Tuesday and doesn’t leave until the weekend. A one-two punch of cold air spreads across the southeast, with impacts felt right up into southern Queensland by Saturday. Not the low level snow found in Victoria and Tasmania, but a hint of a chill in the air. 

While this is slowly rolling through, something very different is brewing in the west. 

It’s the time of year where the sun's energy ramps up and if we don’t have cloud covering the north and interior, then the air starts to bake. 

This forms a large area of heat that is ready to make a big difference to the weather across the country when the wind blows in the right direction.

Winds travel anticlockwise around a high, so the location of that high has a big impact on the temperature of the air. When the centre of the high is to your east, then you’re on the hot side. 

Temperatures jumped up in the west on Thursday - but it was short lived on the west coast with the next trough quickly moving in and cooling things down.

The surge of hotter air works its way across eastern WA and western SA on Friday, SA and western NSW/VIC on Saturday, then Victoria and NSW on Sunday.

Temperatures should rise considerably. It’ll be significantly warmer than average - but nothing we haven’t seen before. 

The warmth comes to an end with a trough that’s fed by tropical moisture from the Indian Ocean. This should spread a band of rain across WA, SA, VIC, TAS and southern NSW - and we’ll be back to snow to low levels in Tasmania by early next week. 

But that burst of heat is likely to be just the first of many, as northern Australia is left considerably hotter by early next week. That’s the start of our summer pool of heat, that’ll just keep growing and won’t diminish until cloud and rain washes it out.

And whenever the wind turns to blow in the right direction - from the northeast in WA, the north in SA, and the northwest in TAS/VIC,NSW/QLD - then those winds will be a lot hotter than what we’ve experienced so far this spring.