Showers have just started moving on to the New South Wales coast, and this will kick off a prolonged run of wet weather over the next several days, affecting parts of eastern Australia, which have already seen significant rain and flooding in the past few weeks.

I'm Angus Hines here at the Bureau of Meteorology. This is a severe weather update. And today is Monday the 18th of August.

Let's dive into the radar from this morning. There's been a few showers inland, but for the most part, I want to draw your attention to the east coast, where we have seen the development of some heavier showers offshore for parts of the Illawarra, Sydney and Newcastle and the Hunter. But in the last few hours they have moved from offshore to onshore.

In fact, let's zoom in a little bit. We've seen some showers move to parts of Sydney, move through parts of Wollongong up towards Newcastle at the moment and where we're seeing yellow, slightly heavier falls. Nothing too dramatic on the radar yet, but we are starting to see that rain creep into the east coast.

Let's move away from what we're seeing towards what we're forecasting. As we put on the data for the next few days, and on the remainder of Monday, we'll see a few more showers along this coast, but it will stay very much near the coastline.

However, into Tuesday, watch how this wet weather signal expands through much of eastern Australia. Potential is there for showers through well the south-east of Queensland, up into the Darling Downs, across into the North West Slopes and Plains, the northern and central Tablelands, as well as the entire coastline of New South Wales.

For Tuesday, we don't anticipate any particularly heavy falls, but there will be some quite widespread risks of wet weather through these eastern areas.

I'm going to continue playing this map now through Wednesday and Thursday. And the key message really is how little changes, we just keep this wet weather signal right across the eastern seaboard through Wednesday. And if anything, that spotty shower signal from Tuesday turns to more widespread, persistent rainfall on Wednesday.

It looks like Wednesday and Thursday will be our two wettest days of the week, with the more persistent rainfall coming in. Rather than the stop start showers, we might see tomorrow. This map is going to come to a close on Thursday night, and there's still a lot of rain between Wollongong and Brisbane across the east coast, including Sydney and much of north-eastern New South Wales.

This wet weather will start to ease on Friday, but for many it probably won't clear until Saturday. So quite a prolonged run of wet weather.

How much we could see? Well, I'm going to put that on a map here. But remember, the further we look out into the future, the more hazy these details become. So I wouldn't take these numbers and lock them in stone just yet. They might get up, they might shift up, they might shift down. But this should give us an indication of the regions where these large rainfall totals could fall.

Remember that red on the map here showing 50mm or more, so we could see that much over the next four days for parts of south-east Queensland and the Darling Downs, but then mostly across the state border in New South Wales.

For the coastline, we could see the heavier falls around the northern rivers and the mid-north coast. And I would say those are two districts we're watching super close because they could see some of the heaviest totals of anywhere in the country this week.

Also, some reasonable rainfall totals through the Hunter, parts of Sydney, parts of the Illawarra, but also the strong signal for rain inland up in the Northern Tablelands, the Central Tablelands and even further west out to the North West Slopes and Plains.

I actually do want to zoom into this area here because rainfall in this part of the country is a little bit more unusual, particularly these multi-day rainfall events through the North West Slopes and Plains, spots like Tamworth, Narrabri, Moree don't tend to see as much rain as their coastal counterparts. So this is quite a significant dose for that part of the country.

And this is made doubly significant by the fact that we still have some flood warnings in place for this part of the country. Now, these two flood warnings, the moderate flood warning for the Namoi River, the minor flood warning for the Barwon River, these are not to do with the upcoming rain.

These rivers are seeing flooding thanks to rain about ten days ago and these rivers still have not subsided. So further wet weather across these soggy catchments will likely mean that these levels start to lift once again across the rivers.

And there have been new rivers also added into a potential flood watch. This is how that flood watch looks. These are rivers which we are watching at the moment for the potential for flooding later in the week.

The key days for flooding look like they will be Wednesday and Thursday. Minor to moderate flooding expected across much of the mid-north coast and up into the Northern Tablelands and North West Slopes and Plains.

I would like to reiterate once again that we could see changes to this flood watch. Potentially new rivers through northern New South Wales or even southern Queensland could be added into the flood watch as our information changes. Same thing could apply down through the Hunter and even down towards Sydney.

So if you live anywhere through north-eastern New South Wales or the far south of Queensland, this is a really good week to stay up to date with your forecast, your warnings and of course your flood watches and warnings. We'll be updating them each and every day on the Bureau's website.

Thanks for watching this video. We'll be back tomorrow with another update to give you the latest information. But for now, thanks for watching.