Severe Tropical Cyclone Narelle is intensifying offshore with damaging to destructive wind gusts and heavy falls increasing for parts of the Pilbara today. Ilana here from the Bureau with your severe weather update on Severe Tropical Cyclone Narelle. Let's start by having a look at today's satellite imagery. We can see this system is currently located about 200 km north-west of Port Hedland, and here we can see the development of an eye in the centre of the system, indicating that it is a severe tropical cyclone and a category three tropical cyclone at that.

The system has brought some significant wind gusts to the area over the past 24 hours, 150 km/h at Bedout Island, 135 at Legendre Island, 80 km/h at Port Hedland, 100 km/h at Karratha and further west we've seen 80 km/h at Barrow Island. Looking forward, what we're expecting today is that this system will continue to track south-west offshore and eventually intensify into a category four system. With that, we do have a tropical cyclone warning and watch zone current.

So starting with this warning area, that's where we're likely to see significant impacts developing over the next 24 hours, including damaging to destructive winds, even some very destructive winds up to and above 200 km/h are possible. We will also see an increase in heavy rainfall with flash flooding a risk, and we're also going to see some increased coastal impacts with some storm tide developing. So those hazards are expected to develop about Port Hedland and Karratha over the next few hours, and extending south and west to Exmouth and Coral Bay later today.

We can see looking at the winds around this system here, even though the system is offshore, it is quite a large system, so we're seeing some of those very strong wind gusts impact on shore. Some of those strongest wind gusts are expected about the Exmouth and North West Cape areas later today. If we have a look now into tomorrow and focus in on this tropical cyclone watch zone in the yellow, that's where we're going to see those damaging to destructive winds, heavy rainfall and damaging storm tide impacts develop from Friday morning through to Saturday morning.

So Carnarvon during Friday morning, extending down to Denham and Kalbarri during Friday and then into Geraldton and surrounds into Saturday morning. Looking at the track map, the system will curve around the Exmouth coast as a category four system before hugging the Gascoyne coast and eventually crossing the coast and continuing south-eastwards as it tracks inland, eventually weakening to a tropical low. That raises the question exactly when and where will the system move onshore.

So we are looking at a coastal crossing sometime on Friday evening or Friday night, and it looks most likely about the Gascoyne coast, so somewhere between Coral Bay and Kalbarri, with the Denham area looking like the most likely scenario. We are expecting this system to cross as a category three severe tropical cyclone. Rainfall is going to be a significant hazard over the next couple of days across much of western Western Australia.

So we do have a flood watch current for a large area extending from about Exmouth down to the Swan River near Perth. If we look at some of those areas which could see some significant falls, in particular into Friday, we could see some very heavy falls around that Exmouth and northern Gascoyne coastal areas. In those areas, we could see rainfall totals up to and above 200 mm.

Some of these heavy falls are going to extend south-west, so although Perth is no longer expected to see a direct hit from the tropical cyclone, it's still looking likely to see rain impacts as well as some possible damaging winds. So we can see here across the South West Land Division, we're looking at rainfall totals of 50 to 100 mm over the next few days.

Please keep up to date with our forecasts and warnings over the next couple of days. You can find them, as always, on our website and app. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you next time.