Spectacular Sydney storms extend city's remarkable rain record
Nature’s fireworks lit up the Sydney skyline on Monday night as ominous shelf clouds and waves of rain swept across eastern NSW.
Showers and thunderstorms formed over central and eastern NSW on Monday afternoon and evening as a passing cold front and low pressure trough cut into a region of warmer and relatively moist air.
The day’s first thunderstorm over Sydney developed shortly after 3pm before another cell clipped the city’s south around 6pm. These were followed by a more active line of storms that passed over the Sydney Basin between 7:30 and 9:30pm.
Images: Lightning over Sydney on Monday night. Source: @ihaig72sydney / Instagram
By midnight, several rounds of storms had hit the Sydney, producing more than 30,000 lightning strikes within 100 km of the city.
Image: Locations of 34,027 lightning strikes detected within 100 km of Sydney between 3pm and midnight on Monday, December 5.
The evening storms were an unwelcome sight for crowds at Jack Johnson’s concert in the Opera House’s Forecourt, which had to be cancelled due to the risk of lightning. According to a post on Jack Johnson’s Instagram page, “The lightning and electrical activity in the area posed a significant risk to public safety and at the venue’s direction we had to stop immediately.”
Monday’s early-summer thunderstorms delivered around 5 to 10 mm of rain across the Sydney Basin, with 6.6 mm falling at Observatory Hill in the city.
While this wasn’t a lot of rain by local standards, it pushed Sydney’s running annual rainfall total for 2022 up to a whopping 2458.4 mm. This is more than twice the city’s long-term annual average of 1213 mm and comfortably Sydney’s highest annual total on record, beating 2194 from 1950.
Image: Sydney’s accumulated rainfall for the year-to-date (up to 9am on December 6. 2022), compared to all other years in Sydney’s observation history, which dates back to 1859.
Sydney should stay mostly dry for the rest of this week, although there is a small chance of showers or storms on Wednesday and more substantial rain is possible early next week.