Regions between southern Tasmania and the NSW Blue Mountains expected to feel strong wind gusts of up to 120km/h.
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00:00Damaging wind gusts to continue across southeastern Australia for Tuesday and Wednesday.
00:04I'm Angus here at the Bureau, let's break it down.
00:06Firstly a quick look at the warning areas, we'll touch on these again through the video
00:10but we can see for now it extends from southern Tasmania to the Blue Mountains inland from
00:15Sydney.
00:16It's a broad region of strong winds over the next few days, the reason being a powerful
00:20cold front is sweeping across southeastern Australia.
00:23It's under this band of cloud which we can see from space on our satellite view and it
00:27does lean back across southern South Australia as well, although it's very weak in this part
00:32of the country, much more vigorous across the southeastern states.
00:35Currently halfway across Tasmania and Victoria, moving northeastwards towards New South Wales
00:40and it has been bringing some very strong wind already but not just wind, we're looking
00:43at quite a lot of rainfall across the southeast, there will be some snow about those higher
00:47peaks, perhaps 5 to 20 centimetres for those alpine ski resorts, we're also looking at
00:52some hail tonight and tomorrow for Tasmania and the south coast of Victoria.
00:57But the most significant, most severe weather associated with this front will be wind.
01:02And to check out how long this wind will stick around we're going to look at this map here,
01:05the forecast winds 1.5 kilometres above the surface of the earth, the reason we look at
01:10this altitude is that's about mountaintop height, meaning the wind blowing at this altitude
01:14is unobstructed by mountains and valleys and buildings and terrain, it's just the unimpeded
01:19flow of the atmosphere which at the moment is flowing from the northwest to the southeast
01:24and it's fair whistling, look at those arrows race across the screen, the red areas are
01:28showing the very strongest winds, well over 100 kilometres an hour across Tasmania and
01:31central and eastern Victoria at the moment but if we start to play through this loop
01:36for the next day or two we'll see it actually start to shift a little bit to the northeast,
01:39the stronger winds move out of Tasmania through eastern Victoria and into New South Wales
01:44on Wednesday morning, Wednesday afternoon we'll really start to see the wind ease back
01:48across Vic and Tas but it will still be windy across New South Wales and then by Wednesday
01:52night, sort of 9 o'clock Wednesday evening, all the strong winds out over the Tasman Sea
01:56and we've got an H, a high pressure area moving in to settle things down.
02:01Before that settling occurs here's a look at our warning areas though, there's a lot
02:04of them, all of these places, so for Tasmania it's the west and north of the state as well
02:08as the islands, for Victoria it is around the mountains to the northeast, the mountains
02:12to the north as well as along the coast of Gippsland and even a very small area, probably
02:16hard to see at this scale, around the Mornington Peninsula and for New South Wales it generally
02:21follows those mountain ranges so we've got the Australian Alps up through the central
02:24and southern Tablelands to the Blue Mountains inland from Sydney.
02:28Through all of these places winds could exceed 90 or 100 kilometres an hour but about some
02:32of those mountains, 120, 130, not out of the question for those strongest gusts, that is
02:37strong enough to bring down trees and branches, potentially cause power outages, damage properties
02:42and make for dangerous driving conditions, particularly in tall vehicles like caravans
02:47as well as on motorbikes.
02:49Now I'm just going to show you Thursday's map as well just to really cement the idea
02:52that the strong winds are coming in Tuesday and Wednesday but Thursday things are really
02:56settling down nicely, a high to the south will mean much calmer winds across most of
03:00these areas, although do note we'll still have a chilly southerly flow along the New
03:04South Wales coast bringing a few showers and also bringing some very large waves.
03:10Stay up to date with your latest forecast and all of these severe weather warnings
03:13at the Bureau website and app and we'll keep updates headed your way on social media too.