A cold front crossing south-eastern Australia has already been bringing snow, hail, strong winds and rainfall over the past 24 hours. And in regards to severe weather, still a bit of a sting in the tail with this weather system in the next 24 hours, particularly when it comes to damaging wind gusts. I'm Angus here at the Bureau. This is a severe weather update focused on south-eastern Australia. Let's dive into it.

This is the current weather situation and this blue line here is our cold front but we're going to see on Thursday morning it quickly moves out into the Tasman Sea, so that one is gone. So, what we're left with is what comes behind the cold front and in this case, it is a really strong south-west wind whistling across the country, starting off down here, racing up and over the map, bringing some cold conditions, but bringing some very strong wind gusts. Let's look at the wind. We'll take the other stuff off the map here.

And what we're really looking for on this map is the oranges and the reds. That shows us our areas of strong to damaging wind gusts. We'll start to see those build over Tasmania this evening, 8 pm on Thursday evening but if I let it play through into the early hours of Friday morning, that's when the wind gusts are really going to be peaking around parts of northern Tasmania, eastern Victoria and southern New South Wales. That will continue through the night tonight. A very windy night for some in this area but by Friday afternoon, it's all pretty much done. So, about midday tomorrow is when the strongest of the winds should have eased.

But between now and then, we've got some Severe Weather Warnings in place. Damaging Wind Warnings for these areas here. There are a few of them. For Tasmania, the strongest winds are expected to be around what we call the Western Tiers, or basically northern parts of the central high terrain on the western side of Tasmania. In this region, wind gusts expected to peak from around about midnight tonight through until around about lunchtime on Friday, and we could see wind gusts of about 110 km an hour through these areas.

For Victoria, a small area here around Wilsons Prom and south and west Gippsland, including Wonthaggi, where wind gusts through the night tonight could reach 90 km an hour. And then we've got a pretty broad region through the mountains of northern Victoria and southern New South Wales, where those wind gusts could see triple figures, at least 100 to 110 km an hour, maybe a little bit more in exposed spots. But those winds will also reach the coast for the far south of the south coast of New South Wales and the far east of Gippsland in Victoria.

And just a reminder, some of the things that we can see when winds reach these 90 km, 100 km or 110 km an hour speeds include damage to trees. They can fall down and damage properties, damage cars. They can also fall down and damage power lines, which leads to power outages, something we commonly see in high wind weather events. And it can make things dangerous on the roads, particularly on motorbikes and high-sided vehicles like buses and trucks, especially if you're driving through high, elevated and exposed roads.

Before we wrap up, a quick look at the waves. Now, we don't have any warnings out at the moment, so this is more of a heads up that we could be seeing some large waves build across the east coast of the country, the New South Wales coast. This could be Friday and then again on Saturday, mostly through areas Newcastle southwards. But that does include the Sydney beaches, the Illawarra beaches, the beaches of the Hunter as well. Some pretty large waves through Friday and heading into the weekend. So, just something to factor in if you're looking to get down towards the water.

Stay up to date with the latest severe weather information on the Bureau's website and app. Thank you so much for watching.