Almost no rain has been recorded anywhere in Australia around lunchtime on this mid-spring Wednesday, and there's not much in sight for the rest of the day.

That got us thinking: could this whole country ever go an entire day without rain?

Australia is a big country, and while it's usually dry in the vast interior, there's almost always rain somewhere on any given day, especially on the coastal fringe and nearby ranges.

Or is there?

The graphic below shows the satellite and radar image at 1:20 pm AEST Wednesday. The almost total absence of green blobs tells you there's not much happening, precipitation-wise.

Observations through lunchtime Wednesday show that no more than 0.2 mm has been recorded at any Australian weather station so far today. That's the minimum amount that registers as rainfall.

But have we ever seen a day without a drop of rain, a flake of snow, or a stone of hail?

The short answer is "we don’t know!" and while that might seem like a copout, that's pretty much exactly the response the BoM gave when asked that question in 2019.

"The team can't comprehensively identify a day in our records where there hasn't been rain somewhere on continental Australia," a bureau spokesman said at the time.

One thing we know is that if a rainless day ever occurred, it would likely be at this time of year. Weatherzone meteorologist Joel Pippard says it would normally only happen in late August, September, or early October.

"It needs to be when oceans are cold, cold fronts aren't frequent, build-up hasn't started, trade winds aren't blowing, and the atmosphere over Australia is stable," he explains.

"That's a tall order for a country as big and varied as Australia, so it would be super rare."

For the record, the BoM uses a network of up to 3000 sites to monitor daily Australian rainfall, located in all Australian states and territories (for the purposes of this story we're not talking about external or offshore territories like Christmas Island or Heard Island).

You might also be interested to know that the BoM breaks Australia's climate into six distinct zones based on temperature and humidity, while according to the widely used international Köppen classification, there are 27 sub-groups of climate zones across Australia.

Source: BoM.

That all means that a lot of ducks have to line up in a row for no rain to fall anywhere. But this Wednesday, October 11 2023 looks like getting about as close as we ever get.

We'll report back tomorrow with the top 10 rainfall observations for Wednesday, assuming there are 10, and update this story with any interesting stats.