South-east Australia hits record June cold, with frosty weather conditions to continue
South-east Australia is shivering through some of its coldest temperatures in years, with brisk winds pushing the morning chill factor even lower.
Sydney experienced its coldest June morning on record on Monday, with a minimum temperature of 1.8C at Olympic Park, according to Miriam Bradbury, a senior meteorologist at the Bureau of Meteorology.
While significant, Bradbury said the monitoring site was only established 12 years ago, so there could have been cooler conditions before then.
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A high pressure system developing as a result of Monday’s cold front will cause cool conditions to continue, even though the front has moved off into the Tasman Sea, Bradbury said.
“So essentially, the cold front brought in the cold and the high pressure system is going to hang on to the cold.”
The minimum temperature in Canberra
dipped to -5.6C on Tuesday morning, while in Sydney it was 6.8C and Melbourne 5C.
And it felt even colder, Bradbury said. Sydney’s minimum felt temperature was barely above zero at 0.5C, while Canberra felt like -9C and Melbourne felt like 3C.
Bradbury said the high pressure system brought clear skies overnight, which cause colder temperatures in the morning.
“We also had some pretty brisk winds through yesterday and overnight and that really made the ‘feels like’ temperature quite a bit lower than it actually was.”
But it’s not immediately good news for the snowfields, Bradbury said.
“We’re actually seeing the chance of snow really dropping away. Even though it’s going to be cold, there’s not really going to be any cloud and rainfall about to turn into snow.”
Most ski resorts in the elevated parts of north-east Victoria and southern NSW have seen between 10-30cm of fresh snow in the last 24 to 30 hours, Bradbury said.
Hotham Ski Resort said it was blanketed in over 40cm of snow in Monday’s storm.
Mount Hotham is set to receive 15-25cm when another snow system descends on Thursday night, according to meteorologist Jane Bunn.
The cold snap comes after parts of Australia experienced their warmest start to winter on record in the first fortnight of June.
Despite the cooler conditions, Bradbury said the longer-term outlook for
the whole winter hasn’t changed. “We’re still expecting it to be warmer than average overall.”
• This article was amended on 20
June 2023. An earlier version incorrectly gave Sydney’s minimum temperature as -1.8C, rather than 1.8C.