The weather bureau warned that surf conditions could be hazardous for coastal activities such as rock fishing, swimming and surfing for the weekend.

The combination of a coastal trough and a strong, slow-moving high-pressure system in the Tasman Sea could lead to strong-to-gale-force winds, possibly causing large waves and swells over Gold Coast Waters.

Gold Coast, Coolangatta and the eastern side of both Moreton Island and North Stradbroke Island could be affected.

Surf Live Saving Queensland has closed several beaches, including Maroochydore, Kawana Waters and Sunshine Beach, because of dangerous surf or strong currents on Saturday.

Bureau of Meteorology forecaster Chris Joseph said there was plenty of activity on the Sunshine Coast on Friday night, with a flood-watch warning in place.

"Noosa had the highest rainfall of 157mm, which is quite significant, since 9am yesterday morning," he said.

"There have been significant winds over over the coastal waters right down to the Gold Coast at the moment ... so the beach will cop a bit of the winds."

The bureau will review the warning for the catchment area after a prolonged period of little rainfall, which was expected to act as a buffer to significant runoff.

"The catchment is extremely dry so we don't expect heavy rainfall through the area again like in the past 24 hours," Mr Joseph said.

The dangerous storm cells are expected to be replaced by bursting rain clouds over south-east Queensland this weekend and the weather bureau expects about 100 millimetres to dampen the clean-up effort.

It comes after incredible stories emerged from Thursday's severe storms and tornadoes including a heroic mother protecting her daughter from hail, the survival of Lazarus the cockatoo and a Woolworths supermarket flooding as water poured in through the ceiling and walls.

The bureau expects more significant rainfall over the weekend, which will then ease to showers and linger over the south-east for the majority of next week.

The worst appears to be over for the Kingaroy area, which received 35 millimetres of rainfall on Friday night, with more showers to come and a slight chance of a storm in sight, according to the weather bureau.

Brisbane City and surrounding areas received about 15 to 20 millimetres on Friday, with the highest rainfall further north at Deagon, which received 26 millimetres.

Meteorologist Adam Blazak had said on Friday widespread rainfall totals were forecast across the region.

"Then it will probably decrease to showers on Sunday and showers on Monday, although those numbers should decrease quickly along coastal margins with 10-20 millimetres on Sunday and five-15 millimetres on Monday," he said.

However, the weather bureau was keeping an eye on a low-pressure trough off the coast.

"One factor creating uncertainty at the moment is a trough off the south-east Queensland coast," Mr Blazak said.

"One side of the trough will get a lot of rain and the other will get almost nothing, despite being almost 50 kilometres away.

"So there is some uncertainty around Sunday and Monday with what trough that trough is doing, by it's looking like moving into NSW at this stage.

"However, if it hangs around, then we might see significant rainfall totals on Sunday again."

Mr Blazak said there were no more storms on the cards, just potentially heavy showers.

A boy was left fighting for life after being hit by a large falling tree in a storm-ravaged region of south-east Queensland on Friday morning.

Bystanders lifted the tree off the boy, believed to be 11 or 12 years old, before paramedics arrived and he was later flown to the Queensland Children's Hospital in Brisbane in a critical condition.

The Queensland Ambulance Service was called to a property in Hodgleigh, 205 kilometres north-west of Brisbane, just after 11am and found the boy had suffered serious injuries "from head to toe" including head, neck, chest, abdomen, pelvis and lower limbs.

One south-east Queensland Woolworths supermarket couldn't handle the volume of rain and sprung multiple leaks in the ceiling and walls in seconds, flooding the registers and forcing an evacuation.

One shopper, Kate Whiteway, was waiting to be served at the store about 3pm when she noticed a small amount of water run down the side wall. In the seconds it took for her to start recording on her phone, water was bursting through the panels from all sides.

"The staff were in total shock at first, but then they were very professional and moved everyone back from the front section of the roof ... and later evacuated us through the front," Ms Whiteway said.

She said she had never seen a storm so intense in the six years she had lived in Cooloola Cove, about 200 kilometres north of Brisbane.

"It was a bizarre, freak-of-nature event ... I just took video in the spur of the moment because I thought no one would believe me if I told the story.

"Since then my phone has just blown up ... maybe no one’s seen a Woolworths leak before."

Also during Thursday’s severe storms, a Queensland mother and her infant daughter were pelted by hail stones after her vehicle's windows were smashed while she was caught on a highway.

Fiona Simpson posted images of her injuries on Facebook and recounted her story of taking the brunt of the storm while on the D'Aguilar Highway, about 200 kilometres north-west of Brisbane, with her baby and grandmother in the vehicle.

Ms Simpson said they parked on the side of the highway as the storm intensified, then hail blew out the windows.

“I covered my infant with my body to stop her from getting badly injured.

“My entire back, arms and head are badly bruised.

"I’m just so relieved that my daughter and grandmother are alright."

The State Emergency Service received 320 calls for help between midday on Thursday and 5.30am on Friday.

"None of these cases were particularly bad," a Queensland Fire and Emergency Service spokeswoman said.

"They were mostly in relation to storm damage, hail damage to windows and skylights, requests for tarps and clearing fallen trees.

Almost 50 SES volunteer reinforcements were sent to the worst-affected areas on Friday morning to help with the recovery efforts.

About 35,000 Energex and Ergon Energy properties lost power at the height of the storms.

A spokesman for the two energy providers, Justin Coomber, said most of the outages were in the Bundaberg, Fraser Coast, South Burnett and Gympie regions.

A Queensland farmer has been nursing a cockatoo back to health after the bird was found battered and bruised in the aftermath of the storms.

Damien Tessmann sought shelter in one of the houses on his family’s Coolabunia property, about 200 kilometres north-west of Brisbane, before assessing the damage and finding the bird, which he had since named Lazarus, in a terrible state.

"When I got back to my house, I ran out the back and found him lying flat underneath the clothesline with his wings out among all the branches and iron," he said.

"I thought the poor guy was dead so I’ve given him a tap with my foot to see and he was alive."

Mr Tessmann said he began tracking down his 250 cows across the paddocks when Lazarus propped up and began walking around his home.

"I then came back to him and he was up on a little bit of a branch perched," he said.

"He’s sitting in a metal rubbish bin with a towel wrapped around him in the workshop with some corn to munch on.

"The good people of Kingaroy would have been able to hear his ear-piercingly loud screeches when I grabbed him."

Mr Tessmann said Lazarus had a damaged eye that had swelled up and he was unable to fly before he picked him up.

"I’ll take him to the vet to have a look at him because I’m not sure whether he is just shell-shocked or has some sort of damage," he said.

Mr Tessmann said the storm had killed many birds, "from bush turkeys to pigeons and everything ... the poor buggers had nowhere to go, so the fact that he’s survived is pretty impressive."

Larrissa Donalds, who lives in South Kolan about 25 kilometres south-east of Bundaberg, said she lost power about 8pm, before it came back on for two hours and then went out again until 4am.

"The hail smashed a couple of windows, it's the biggest hail I've ever seen," she said.

"I've seen worse with the rain, but the hail was the worst I've ever seen, it came down for a good 15-20 minutes.

"It was just massive, in between the size of a golf ball and a tennis ball."

Destructive winds and large hailstones smashed parts of south-east Queensland as tornadoes formed near Kingaroy.

Gympie residents saw hail the size of golf balls, trees falling, debris and items as big as a trampoline get thrashed against a gate in the strong winds.

Local resident Melinda Ellison said "cyclonic winds and hail" was coming in horizontally.

"I have never seen hail like that before, it was really loud and extremely scary as I was home alone," she said.

"The hills around us looked like ski fields."

Mrs Ellison was also without power and using a generator on Thursday morning after the "cyclonic winds" and hail that hit her home.

"We live out of town and don’t have water or access to anything but we are lucky to have a generator but there’s a lot of people that don’t even have that," she said.

"Most of Gympie is still without power right now and it’s still raining, which is making it a lot more difficult for Energex and everyone trying to clean up.

"The town is filled with debris and trees have been stripped of all their leaves, a lot of homes that have been hit had their windows smashed and cars dented," she said.

The worst of the storms appeared to have passed north and inland of the Sunshine Coast.

Gympie copped a 98km/h wind gust and 42 millimetres of rain, while 76 millimetres of rain fell at Noosa and 80 millimetres fell at Mingo Creek in the Wide Bay. Blackwater, much further north and west of Rockhampton, recorded a wind gust of 144 km/h.

The worst of the weather had cleared across the south-east by 6.30pm, when the bureau cancelled a severe storm warning that had stretched from Rainbow Beach to Stanthorpe.

The tornado threat had eased an hour earlier as areas including Wide Bay, Darling Downs and Granite Belt, southern Capricornia and the southern Central Highlands and Coalfield braced for large hail and winds.

Nanango MP Deb Frecklington, Queensland's state opposition leader, said the storms had hit hard.

"We’re used to extreme weather in my patch, but this was something else," she said.

"The supercell hit the community in many different ways – crops have been written off, properties damaged and animals injured.

"People are picking themselves up and dusting themselves off, but the recovery will test us."