Rain, and plenty of it, and wild storms have lashed Victoria overnight.
After patchy rain in recent days, a rainband delivered heavy rain to all Victorian forecast districts on Wednesday night into Thursday morning with the exception of east Gippsland, which can expect handy falls through Thursday.
Some of the notable falls included:
- Ballarat had 46.2 mm, its wettest June day in 115 years
- Strathbogie had 93 mm, its wettest June day in 105 years
- Mt Buller had 97.6 mm of very clear, unfrozen rain, its wettest June day in 42 years and not exactly what snow-lovers were looking for ahead of this weekend’s ski season opening
- Numerous readings of 100 mm or more were recorded in northern Vic
The loop below shows the lightning over Victoria last night. As mentioned, the rain was accompanied by storms in many distriocts, and those storms in western Vic were intense. At one stage, the BoM even issued a short-lived tornado warning.
Around 660,000 lightning pulses were detected over Australia during the last 36 hours. That’s pretty unusual for June! âš¡ï¸� pic.twitter.com/G1tfPyoIRO
— Andrew Miskelly (@andrewmiskelly) June 7, 2023
While no tornadoes were reported to have touched down, skies were ablaze with lightning, with more than half a million lightning strikes recorded in under two days. That’s a lot of lightning for any season, let alone winter when rain in southern Australia tends to have less of a light show associated with it.
Meanwhile some of the rainfall totals recorded in Victoria overnight were remarkable. As mentioned they included numerous extremely heavy 24-hour falls of over 100 mm in the North Central and North East parts of the state.
Take a look at the BoM image below. The red dots are falls of 100 mm or more.
Source: BoM.
These are many of the same spots that had the heaviest rain in the state during the October 2022 Victorian floods that affected Shepparton, Echuca and many other towns.
A Moderate Flood Warning has already been issued for the Goulburn River (which flows through Shepparton) and while the main rainband will clear Victoria later today, it seems certain that more flood warnings will be posted throughout the day. Please check our warnings page.