Canberra has had its hottest ever start to spring off the back of its warmest winter on record, and there’s still another week of warm temperatures to come.
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The temperature on Monday reached 25.2 degrees, which was the earliest Canberra’s thermometers have risen above the 25-degree mark in September, and breaks the previous record (September 13, 2008 and 2009) by more than 10 days.
And, according to the Bureau of Meteorology’s Sean Carson, there’s still more warmth on the way.
“I think we’ll do it again this week, so that’ll make it two 25s that we haven’t had before, and there’s even a chance of getting three of them,” he said.
From looking at the forecasts, Mr Carson said it will easily be the warmest first week of spring – he expects the average top temperature to be somewhere around 22 degrees or more, which is well above the historical September average of 16 degrees.
Canberra’s top temperatures will hover in the low to mid 20s into early next week, with just a few possible light showers forecast for Friday and Saturday.
“There’s certainly no cool air associated with it though. The only thing bringing the temperatures down is a bit of increase in cloud, otherwise the warm air pretty much continues to sit over us,” Mr Carson said.
Mr Carson said the warm air mass that led to last week’s and this week’s warmth means there is also a chance each day the actual temperature could exceed the forecast maximums if all the right factors match up.
“The warm air is lying over us … it’s pretty consistent. So it just depends on what happens at the surface. If you get maximum sunshine and winds generally from a west to north-west direction, that is they’re blowing from the interior over Canberra, we can maximise our temperature,” he said.
Despite the warm days, Canberrans are still seeing fairly cool starts to each morning, with lows of -0.5 degrees on Sunday, 1 degree on Monday and 2.8 degrees on Tuesday.
“It’s pretty extreme between night and day,” Mr Carson said. “[But] it is pretty typical at this time of year, we can always get something in the low to mid-20s in terms of change between day and night.”
Mr Carson said looking ahead there was a chance of a strong cold front mid next week, but it was still too far out to tell.
