When you think of Australia’s coldest capital cities on a day-to-day basis, you may think of Hobart or Canberra, and possibly Melbourne or even Adelaide on the right day. It’s quite a rare occurrence that Sydney takes the title of Australia’s coldest capital, but by noon on Saturday, it was.

Shortly after 10am, all the southern capital cities made it over 10°C, and have gradually continued warming, while Sydney remained stranded just above that mark leaving it as the coldest capital city for a little over two hours. 

Image: Forecast maximum temperature for Sydney and surrounds for Saturday 22nd June, using ACCESS-C Syd 

While there is still plenty of time for the day to warm up a little bit more in Sydney, there are good indications that this will be the coldest day of the year so far, even colder than the 13.9°C recorded last week. This is due to an offshore trough driving persistent rain up the NSW coast. It started raining in the Sydney basin around 2am, with rain continuing throughout the morning.

You can see in the below image that Sydney’s temperature has been remarkably consistent between midnight and midday, only cooling to 9.0°C not long after sunrise and staying below 11°C until just before midday. This corresponds with a 30 minute dry period which allowed temperatures to rise to the maximum to 12pm of 11.0°C.

Image: Sydney’s temperature, dewpoint and rainfall graph to 12:10pm Saturday 22nd June 

On top of being the coldest capital, Sydney was feeling like just 7.2 degrees at noon! Looking around Australia, temperatures (and feels like temperatures) at 12pm (AEST) for the other capitals were

• Adelaide: 14.0°C (12.6°C) 
• Brisbane: 16.3°C (14.1°C) 
• Canberra: 11.3°C (4.6°C) 
• Darwin: 27.9°C (23.9°C) 
• Hobart: 11.6°C (7.2°C) 
• Melbourne: 12.9°C (12.0°C) 
• Perth: 17.7°C (13.0°C) 

 In better news for Sydneysiders who are not fans of cold days, tomorrow will very likely be warmer than today, with daytime temperatures reaching into the high teens by the middle of next week.