Melbourne is set for mild conditions later this week after a storm brought an abrupt end to the balmy Easter weather, capping off an abnormally warm and dry March.
Bureau of Meteorology senior meteorologist Dean Narramore said heavy rain hit northern Tasmania and Melbourne on Easter Monday, and the remnants would head up the coast on Tuesday.
Melburnians enjoying the sunshine at St Kilda beach on Easter Saturday.Credit: Justin McManus
“It’s been pretty wet in the last 24 hours or so – falls of 40 to 70 millimetres in the central part of the state including 53 in Melbourne, and 80 millimetres out towards the Dandenongs, and we still expect some showers and storms the eastern part of the state today,” Narramore said.
Later in the week, conditions for Melbourne and most of the state will be drier and warmer with tops of 21 to 22 degrees heading into the weekend.
Narramore said an east coast low bringing rain and thunderstorms to most of the NSW coast on Thursday and Friday would bypass most of Victoria except for East Gippsland.
Heading into mid-autumn, the Bureau of Meteorology forecasts the maximum and minimum temperatures for April to June will probably be higher than usual for most of Australia.
The bureau released its national data for March on Tuesday, showing the nation experienced unusually warm and wet conditions nationally, and abnormally dry and warm weather in NSW, Victoria and Tasmania.
The average national temperature was 1.11 degrees above the 1961-1990 average, which made it the equal 10th-warmest March on record since 1910.
In NSW, the mean temperatures were the fifth-highest on record at 2.11 degrees above the long-term average, while the minimum and maximum temperatures were also higher than normal.
The average national minimum temperature was 1.79 degrees above the norm, the equal second-highest after 2016. Queensland shattered its record for the highest average minimum temperature in March at 2.49 degrees above the long-term trend.
Nationally, the rainfall total for March was 86.1 per cent above the 1961-1990 average, the third-wettest March on record since the national dataset began in 1900. The biggest deluges were in Western Australia, where it was 166.8 per cent higher than normal, followed by the Northern Territory, South Australia and Queensland.
But in south-eastern Australia, it was unusually dry. NSW had an average of 33 millimetres of rain in March, 39 per cent lower than is typical for the time of year. Victoria’s rainfall was just 9.2 millimetres on average – 78 per cent lower than usual.
University of Melbourne climate scientist Dr Andrew King said it had been “remarkably dry” in Melbourne until Monday night, when 53 millimetres of rain fell in two hours. If it had happened a day earlier, it would have made the average monthly rainfall look normal.
“We generally expect with climate change that more of the rain will fall in heavy bursts and less in drizzle-type rain,” King said. “This was a good demonstration of that with a very dry spell followed by an extreme rain event.”
He added the climate usually differed between the east and west coasts, but this was an “unusually strong contrast” because of cyclones hitting Western Australia. The recent Australian summer was the third-hottest on record, based on the average, minimum and maximum temperatures for December, January and February.
Globally, 2023 was the hottest year on record, January 2024 was the hottest January on record, and February the hottest ever February. This is based on the ERA5 dataset managed by the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.
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