Hello, it's Angus here at the Bureau with a Severe Weather Update for the 16th of October.

We've got an active array of weather across southern and eastern Australia. We're talking high temperatures, strong winds, elevated fire danger, and also the potential for severe thunderstorms over the next few days. I'm going to break it down day by day. We'll go through all of Thursday, then have a look at what is happening on Friday.

So Thursday is going to be a hot day across the south-east. We've got the warmth from central Australia getting dragged this way by some strong winds, giving us 31 °C in Melbourne, high thirties in parts of northern Victoria, and high thirties to near 40 °C across much of South Australia, high twenties in Tasmania. For many of these areas, it’s the warmest weather since about March, since the end of the last warm season.

But it’s not just warm today, it’s also quite windy. We've got these winds racing across the south-east. It’s a very windy day across Tasmania and Victoria in particular. Parts of southern SA will get some of that breeze as well, but not quite as windy as the other states.

On days which are hot and windy, that should be ringing a little bell in your head, because at this time of year that means elevated fire danger is possible. And indeed we see that today.

Here’s the Fire Danger Ratings across the south-east. We've got one area of extreme fire danger – that’s the Mallee in north-western Victoria – but lots of places at high fire danger, including parts of the peninsulas and the Mount Lofty Ranges in South Australia, most of southern Victoria, including around Melbourne, most of southern Tasmania, including around Hobart, and patches of central and eastern New South Wales, including around the Sydney and Canberra areas.

Remember that elevated fire danger doesn’t necessarily mean that more fires will begin, but it means that any fires which do start can spread very rapidly and quickly become uncontrollable.

With the hot weather today, we will also be seeing a cool change coming in – quite a classic tale for southern parts of the country, where a hot day finishes with a big drop in temperature. That’s because of this cold front, which is going to be moving across the south-east later on Thursday, reaching parts of South Australia in the afternoon and crossing Victoria through the evening.

It’s likely to be around about 8:00 pm in Melbourne, perhaps just a touch earlier than that through Hobart. And that change will do a few things. Firstly, the cool change will do what it says on the box – it will cool things down. Temperatures will drop pretty sharply as that change moves through. In some areas, it could drop more than 10 °C in half an hour, but it will also bring off some showers and the potential for thunderstorms.

Here’s a look at today’s thunderstorm map across the country. We actually see a lot of thunderstorm risk across northern and eastern Australia, but I want to focus us on here on the south of the country because these storms are what’s going to be driven by that passing cool change later on today.

We could see thunderstorms this afternoon around Adelaide and most of south-eastern South Australia, as well as western Victoria. The darker green shows us where thunderstorms are possible, but not as likely. So there’s a chance that we could finish the day in Melbourne with a rumble of thunder after the hot, windy conditions earlier on.

That’s enough about Thursday. So what are we looking at on Friday? It’s still going to be hot in some places, but much cooler across the south-east. No surprise – that cold change moves through, and temperatures are more than 10 °C cooler in some areas.

However, northern New South Wales and up into the centre still warm – 32 °C in Sydney, and that could be as much as 35 °C in the western suburbs. So we’re really getting that heat around the east coast for Friday this time around.

On Friday we’ll see a bit of action with the same cool change. It’s going to start to work its way north-eastwards now, pushing along the southern coast of New South Wales in the morning, reaching the Sydney area around about 4:00 pm in the afternoon. That’s when your big change in weather is coming after a hot day, and then pushing through northern New South Wales through the afternoon and evening.

You can see quite a lot of action here on the map. This change is likely to spark off a lot of showers and storms across New South Wales on Friday afternoon and evening for the north-east of the state. In fact we could even be seeing severe thunderstorms tomorrow.

This is how the map looks for tomorrow – we have quite a lot of red on the map, and red tells us where severe thunderstorms are likely to occur. That includes a pretty big part of the east coast and interior of New South Wales, including Sydney, all of the Hunter Region including Newcastle, up into the mid-north coast, across the Blue Mountains, into the Tablelands and even into parts of the western slopes and plains.

In these areas here, where we could see severe thunderstorms tomorrow, the main threats will be large hailstones and damaging wind gusts. There will be some rain as well, but the rain might not be especially heavy. More broadly, we can see a big threat of thunderstorms right across the east coast from Canberra up to Brisbane.

But it’s this area here where we should keep a close eye tomorrow. Keep a watch on the radar and any Severe Thunderstorm Warnings that get issued as these storms start to develop. It could be a very active day for northern New South Wales.

So you can always get the latest on your forecast and warnings on the Bureau’s website and app. Thanks for watching. Have a safe day and week.