Jane's Weather: Drought stricken farmers finally receive rain over the long weekend
Many places picked up more rain over the three day weekend than they did in the first two months of the year.
A few spots located well inland did only receive 5mm to 10mm, but the vast majority saw good rainfalls, incredibly useful after such a long period of well below average rain, transforming paddocks and dams.
The big question is - is there any more rain to come?
A big, juicy, follow up rain system would be very welcome, but we don't have one of those lining up for the southeast in the foreseeable future. Most areas are likely to see less than 10mm over the next week.
The next low is crossing the Bight on Wednesday, heading towards the southeast.
This one is going to take a very different path to the last one (that slowly trekked across Bass Strait then out to the Tasman Sea - a perfect path for big rainfalls in the southeast).
This one is going to deliver 5mm to 10 mm for parts of South Australia (over the Eyre Peninsula, West Coast and Northwest Pastoral), then rapidly dissipate, bringing hardly anything to the rest of the southeast.
It then re-forms over the Tasman Sea late in the week, brushing the NSW coast.
There is another system lining up to cross the southwest on Friday and South Australia on Saturday. Then this one also dissipates, with just a little rain for the rest of the southeast on Sunday.
That does pave the way for another weather system to come up from the south (skipping southwestern Australia), barrelling through the southeast on Monday into Tuesday next week.
At this stage it just looks like a regular cold front, with the best falls (10mm to 20mm, locally more) near the coast and in western Tasmania, drying up as it heads north and east.
The outlook for the next few months has the moisture part of the rain equation working well: A neutral Pacific Ocean, with plenty of warmer than average water off eastern Australia (to bring us a local source of moisture rather than the global effects of an El Nino or La Nina); and a developing Negative Indian Ocean Dipole (to give us a big push of moisture from the Indian Ocean).
But that's the moisture part of the equation - not the instability part.
You need low pressure to turn that moisture into rain and if the lows can't track where they are needed, there won't be much rain.
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