Nature put on a spectacular show over a huge portion of eastern New South Wales on Friday night, as a trough with a huge line of embedded thunderstorms crossed the state.

It was like someone left the lights on just after dark, as a total of 37,178 lightning strikes were recorded within a 100 km radius of downtown Sydney, in a natural fireworks display lasting a couple of hours that rivalled anything on New Year's Eve.

Of those 37,000-plus strikes, 8191 were classed as ground strikes, which means they touched an object or the earth.

Did anyone else see the lightning as it rolled across the Sydney area overnight? The #NSWRFS crew at our Engadine Brigade certainly did, with one of their members snapping this great photo. Lightning can start fires in remote bushland, report unattended fires to Triple Zero (000) pic.twitter.com/wyp21CgeUg

— NSW RFS (@NSWRFS) April 7, 2023

Weatherzone tracks lightning through our Total Lightning Network, which utilises a vast global sensor network to tracks both intra-cloud and cloud-to-ground lightning strikes.

You might recall that we wrote on Wednesday that severe storms would cross eastern Australia on Good Friday.

That's how things indeed panned out, and you can see the line of storms crossing NSW on the loop below showing the three hours just after twilight.

The chart below shows the extent of the rain that fell on Good Friday, most of which was associated with the storms.

Image: A decent drop fell across a wide area on Friday. Source: BoM.

While Friday's storms provided one heck of a light show, in most places that thankfully came without large hail, excessively heavy rain, or damaging winds. However there were spots where conditions briefly became pretty extreme.

• For example, gusts up to 104 km/h were recorded at Oakey, just northwest of Toowoomba on Qld’s Darling Downs, while large hail up to 11 cm was also reported in the area.
• Large hail was also reported near Yass, about an hour north of Canberra.

A clearing trend is in place for most areas affected by Friday's storms with windy but fine weather expected over the rest of the Easter long weekend.

Down south, conditions will not be so pleasant, with cold showery weather setting in around Melbourne, where a top of just 14°C is now expected for Easter Sunday.