Welcome winter? Cold snap heralds beginning of SEQ dry season

Winter has hit Brisbane following a wetter-than-average autumn, as the city shivers through a spate of cold nights across the week.

Brisbanites woke up to temperatures grazing the single digits on Friday, with minimum temperatures across the city ranging from 9 to 10 degrees, after Queensland recorded its coldest morning of 2025 the day before.

With sunnier afternoon conditions and clear skies predicted across next week, Bureau of Meteorology climatologist Felicity Gamble said the entire south-east could finally expect drier conditions with the change of the season.

Brisbane has recorded its coldest overnight temperature in the early hours of Thursday, with the city set to brush the single digits again across Thursday and Friday.Credit: Felicity Caldwell

“It has been quite a wet May, for south-east Queensland, and, in fact, when you look at the autumn period as a whole, much of south-east Queensland was substantially wetter than average,” Gamble said.

“Certainly, [for] the next few days we are going to see a fairly stable weather pattern … what we’d probably typically expect for this time of year, so, fairly clear skies and fairly stable weather patterns.”

A front driving from southern states brought the cold snap, with frost in parts of Queensland’s south-west on Wednesday as minimum temperatures of zero degrees hit areas near Toowoomba and Applethorpe, close to the NSW border.

On Friday, temperatures below 5 degrees were recorded across the Darling Downs region, and Ipswich plunged to 5 degrees just after 6.30am.

However, long-term reporting from the weather bureau suggested the state as a whole would probably have warmer daytime maximums and overnight minimum temperatures through winter.

Gamble said further frosts were still likely – particularly in the south-western regions – and the warmer temperatures could actually be short-term boon.

“We’re still likely to see some of that evaporative effect from warmer-than-average temperatures that will also help to dry out some of those very wet soils that just remained impacted from that very wet autumn that we’ve just had,” Gamble said.

While May rainfall fell below year-on-year averages for Brisbane, the city waded through its wettest March on record, with Cyclone Alfred dumping over 450 millimetres in four days.

Newmarket residents surveying floodwater on Edmondstone Street on March 9, the day before the city would record 275mm rainfalls from ex-tropical cyclone Alfred.Credit: Getty Images

The extreme weather event also set records for the wettest single autumn day on March 10, when the city recorded 275.2 millimetres, and overall accounted for more than half the total rainfall for the season.

Modelling also predicted southern Queensland would remain wetter than average through winter.

Gamble said rain would probably return towards the end of the season, driven in from Western Australia and hitting south-western Queensland the hardest.

“What we’re seeing emerge is a pattern, potentially a negative phase of the Indian Ocean Dipole… it’s essentially like a La Nina equivalent, but in the Indian Ocean,” Gamble said.

Gamble said the weather system pushed rain bands across the country, as happened across last weekend when the south-east region was dominated by grey skies and scattered rainfall.

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