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Soupy atmosphere fuels further widespread storms

Widespread showers and storms will continue across a broad area of Australia in coming days due to an extremely moist airmass that is in no hurry to go anywhere.

It’s a continuation of the recent pattern where much of the country has seen heavy downpours at times – with the exception of southern and western areas of WA and large chunks of South Australia.

The reason for the widespread outbreak of soupy, humid weather?

Imae: Sea surface temps around Australia on Tuesday, December 3, 2024. Source: BoM.

• Moisture is being drawn across the country, with evaporation enhanced by an area of ocean off the country's northwestern coastline, where sea surface temperatures are as much as two to four degrees above average.
• A broad trough of low pressure is sitting across inland parts of the continent.
• A slow-moving high centred over the Tasman Sea is also continuing to funnel moist winds onshore from the Tasman and Coral Seas.

Image: Synoptic chart for Thursday, December 5, 2024.

So in essence, you've got a combination of features thousands of kilometres apart which are contributing the rain and storm potential. That's why we're seeing falls not just in the usual tropical locations or along the east coast, which is often wet in summer.

Indeed, as you can see below on our seven-day forecast for Uluru, showers and/or storms are possible on each of the next seven days. It's not often that you see a forecast like that in summer in southern parts of the Northern Territory.

Image: Daily forecast on the Weatherzone app for Uluru, NT.

Meanwhile, conditions are pretty uncomfortable across most of the areas mentioned at the moment due to the high humidity levels.

As the video loop below shows, the dew point has been exceptionally high across much of Australia this week.

Soupy air mass sloshing around Australia showing no immediate signs of moving on. pic.twitter.com/d2YSNkgK7f

— Andrew Miskelly (@andrewmiskelly) December 4, 2024

In super-simple terms, dew point is a measure of atmospheric moisture. The more moisture the air contains, the higher its dew point – and the harder it becomes for our bodies to cool by sweating.

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