Rain finally fell in the southeast, with a little more to come

A quarter of Victoria recorded more than 50mm of rain on the long weekend.

The majority of southeastern Australia recorded more than 25mm of rain.

A few spots located well inland did only receive 5 to 10 mm, but the vast majority saw good rainfalls. 

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The big question is - is there any more rain to come? 

A big, juicy, follow up rain system would be very welcome, but we don’t have one of those lining up for the southeast in the foreseeable future. Most areas are likely to see less than 10mm over the next week.

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The next low is crossing the Bight on Wednesday, heading towards the southeast. This one is going to take a very different path to the last one (that slowly trekked across Bass Strait then out to the Tasman Sea - a perfect path for big rainfalls in the southeast).

This one is going to deliver 5 to 10 mm for parts of South Australia (over the Eyre Peninsula, West Coast and Northwest Pastoral), then rapidly dissipate, bringing hardly anything to the rest of the southeast. It then re-forms over the Tasman Sea late in the week, brushing the NSW coast. 

There is another system lining up: crossing the southwest on Friday and South Australia on Saturday. Then this one also dissipates, with just a little rain for the rest of the southeast on Sunday.

That does pave the way for another weather system to come up from the south (skipping southwestern Australia), barrelling through the southeast on Monday into Tuesday next week. At this stage it just looks like a regular cold front, with the best falls (10 to 20 mm, locally more) near the coast and in western Tasmania, drying up as it heads north and east. 

The outlook for the next few months has the moisture part of the rain equation working well: a neutral Pacific Ocean, with plenty of warmer than average water off eastern Australia (to bring us a local source of moisture rather than the global effects of an El Nino or La Nina); and a developing Negative Indian Ocean Dipole (to give us a big push of moisture from the Indian Ocean). 

But that’s the moisture part of the equation - not the instability part.

You need low pressure to turn that moisture into rain, and if the lows can’t track where they are needed, there won’t be much rain.

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