There's not a whole lot of dynamic weather around Australia this Thursday, with cloud-free skies dominating the continent.

The satellite picture shows a little cloud here and there, but the stuff along the east coast is delivering almost no rain, and the real story is the second image below, which shows the radar just before midday.

If you squint your eyes you can make out some light showers in northwest Tasmania while there's also a speck or two of rain in the Coral Sea off the Queensland coast.

But the whole of mainland Australia is dry.

It's pretty unusual to see Australia free of showers in late August, especially the southern third from southwest WA to eastern Victoria

But that's the way things look like remaining for the rest of winter 2023, with no significant outbreak of cold wet wintry weather on the cards.

Why so dry?

As Weatherzone meteorologist Ben Domensino wrote on Wednesday, the current dry pattern is to be expected when the Indian Ocean Dipole is in a positive phase, as it is right now. Indeed the IOD is at its highest level since 2019.

You can read Ben's story to see exactly what that the IOD is, and how it works. The story contains several helpful diagrams, but we'll throw the key one in again here.

Image: Typical structure and impacts of a positive IOD.

As you can see, a positive IOD occurs when:

• Warmer than average water builds up in the western tropical Indian Ocean, near the Horn of Africa
• And unusually cold water lies in the eastern Indian Ocean, near Indonesia.

This reduces the amount of atmospheric moisture flowing towards Australia from the northwest, which typically suppresses rainfall and increases daytime temperatures over parts of the continent.

Thursday, August 24 is a good example of conditions across Australia during a positive IOD.

With strong agreement between forecast models suggesting that a positive IOD will continue into spring, we can expect plenty more cloud-free days in coming months, with below-average rainfall and above-average daytime temps in many areas.