Hello, I'm Angus here at the Bureau of Meteorology with a severe weather update focusing on south-eastern Australia, where we could see multiple weather warnings between now and the weekend. The severe weather has already started for some areas on Thursday.

Today we will see heavy rain and some strong winds building across southern and eastern parts, with a focus on new South Wales, Victoria and ACT. For many people on Thursday first and foremost in your mind should be the chance of severe thunderstorms, because, as we can see on our thunderstorm outlook map for today, the chance of severe thunderstorms as shown in yellow and red on the map here is very extensive, covering most of eastern Victoria and almost all of eastern New South Wales.

Severe thunderstorms won't affect all communities in these colored areas, but where they do occur, they could bring a full array of weather hazards, including heavy rain and flash flooding, damaging wind gusts and large hailstones. In particular, heavy rain could be an issue in this region here, south of Canberra for the Southern Tablelands, Snowy Mountains and eastern Victoria, where significant areas of flash flooding could occur as these storms do bring very heavy falls.

It's not just thunderstorms, which could be an issue for today. We also see the wind picking up across the south-east with damaging winds anticipated tonight, overnight and into Friday morning for parts of Victoria, we have got damaging wind warnings in place across the south coast of the state from the Gippsland coast, around Bairnsdale, across to Torquay, down on the Bellarine Peninsula.
We also expect some blustery winds in the Macedon Ranges a little further north. In these areas, winds could gust up to 100km an hour, damaging trees and houses and potentially leading to power outages.

Eagle eyed viewers will have seen a second warning area up across New South Wales, and that is where our focus shifts tomorrow as we look at the weather forecast for Friday. And that is because of a low pressure area which is forecast to develop on Friday morning, somewhere off the east coast of New South Wales. We can see the circulation in here. Now, there it is. The low pressure pops up some stage during the morning hours.

This low pressure area here is going to drive heavy rain and the risk of damaging winds onto the New South Wales coast, mostly on the southern side of the low. So we're really looking at areas south of Sydney as picking up the most significant conditions.

So here is the severe weather warning for Friday. We can see it extends from Wollongong down to the Victorian border, covering the south coast area and parts of the Illawarra. In this region we’ll likely see some damaging wind gusts on Friday, up to about 100km an hour. We will also see some heavy, persistent rain. Six hourly rainfall totals through Friday morning in particular, could be anywhere from 80 to 120mm, and some spots are likely to see even more than that. So very wet, very windy through this area on Friday.

But we will also be seeing another day with severe thunderstorms possible for eastern New South Wales. So we talked about the severe weather being quite bad down here, when it comes to the thunderstorms, potentially they could get a little bit worse across northern parts of New South Wales, with a severe thunderstorm risk for the Hunter, Mid-north coast, northern rivers and adjacent inland and Tableland areas. Once again, heavy rain, damaging wind, large hail absolutely could all occur with thunderstorms across the north- east of New South Wales on Friday.

So that's a look out to Friday. I also want to quickly talk about the weekend as well, because this weather event does not wrap up quickly. We will see further rainfall piling into soaked parts of southern New South Wales throughout the course of the weekend.

If we zoom in on the south coast here, this is total rainfall between now and Sunday night, and over that time, we certainly could be looking at 150 to 200mm, maybe more across this area here, the Illawarra and the south coast are our two districts, which will likely see the most significant falls in the coming few days.

While I've got this rainfall map up on screen, I also wanted to show you that for areas north of the mountains in Victoria, including key fire grounds like the Longwood and the Walwa fire, not much rain is forecast in the coming days, likely just single digit rainfall totals, and in fact gusty winds could cause those fires to flare up once again.

So just before wrapping up a couple of the key weather impacts to be aware of in coming days. Flash flooding could be significant, swift and dangerous where heavy rain occurs, either with thunderstorms or in the severe weather warning area, there's likely to be disruption and delays to travel and transport, including road closures.

It's going to be very rough on the coastline for boats and maybe even impact to flight and travel, and we are expecting to see some really gusty winds through Victoria potentially blowing over some of those ongoing bushfires, maybe causing some hassles there.

So it's a good week and a good weekend to stay up to date with warnings and your forecast on the Bureau's website and app. Thanks for watching.