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So much snow overnight, the cars were buried

Anthony Sharwood

If that's you who left your car in the Perisher car park overnight, we sure hope you've got a shovel.

As this image illustrates better than any beautiful vista of mountains or snow gums, the first really big snowfall of the year has coated ski resorts like Perisher and Thredbo in the Snowy Mountains of NSW in up to 60 centimeters of snow, and there could be more on the way in the coming days.

Image: Time to get diggin'! Source: @perisher_resort on Instagram.

Perisher's "snow stake" shows around 50 centimetres of accumulation on Thursday morning. It was cleared on Wednesday after receiving the first 10 cm or so from this storm.

Image: They got even more cm of snow than the NSW Blues scored points in the State of Origin. Source: Perisher resort via ski.com.au.

This has been an unusual weather system, with moisture feeding in to the mountains from an easterly direction - due to the cut-off low pressure system we wrote about earlier this week.

That tends to make the snow exceptionally damp and almost cement-like rather than "powdery", but it's great for building a snow bsase, and the NSW resorts will doubtless be pleased ahead of this weekend's official season opener, when numerous ski lifts should be spinning.

Note that we specifically said "NSW resorts" there, because alas, Victoria has partially missed out from this system.

As you often see with cut-off-lows, pools of cold air air drift north, while moist air from as far north as the tropics can be drawn southwards.

That's why mainland Australia's southernmost two ski resorts - Mt Buller and Mt Baw Baw - have unfortunately seen heavy rain for the last 18 hours or so, washing away snow that fell on Tuesday and early Wednesday. It's also why so much rain has fallen in other parts of Victoria.

Meanwhile further north in NSW, snow has fallen on the Central and Northern Tablelands, with more falls possible today.

We'll keep you posted. Oh, and you're not actually supposed to park overnight in the Perisher car park. Reckon one driver might have learned that lesson the hard way.

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