A wild weather system is crossing Australia’s southeast with damaging wind gusts, abnormally high tides, dust storms contrasting with heavy rain, bitterly cold air, and even snow on the ranges.

This is a proper cold outbreak and is likely to be one of the coldest days of the year.

The rain totals are a nice top up for our farmers, with many areas recording 20mm to 40 mm.

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After an incredibly dry May (and for most of the 18 months before it) the big June systems have been very welcome by those doing it tough.

The ranges of eastern Victoria and southern NSW picked up huge rainfalls, locally over 100mm, before it changed to snow in the alps.

Now there have been snowfalls of 30cm to 40cm by the morning’s snow depth check, with more to come during Wednesday. The alps have been returned to a winter wonderland.

The coldest air passes overhead on Wednesday afternoon and evening, which lets snow lower to around 800 metres or locally 600 metres (in southern NSW, and across Victoria and Tasmania) and could result in snow falling in a few unusual spots.

We’re also seeing wintry hail in the showers passing through, the tiny balls of ice that bounce when they reach the ground. Not snow, but ice.

If you’re checking your barometer you will notice it’s a lot lower than we’ve seen for a while. This is a powerful system, and delivers the dangerous conditions associated with a huge pressure gradient.

South Australia’s coast was hammered by abnormally high tides, and that spread to Victoria and Tasmania’s coastlines on Wednesday.

Winds reached damaging threshold’s across elevated parts of the southeast, along with coastal areas and some isolated spots inland. The sheep graziers alerts have the proper trifecta of cold, wet and windy - with each of those elements thoroughly met.

The wild weather rapidly eases early on Thursday and up next we have a stretch of cold nights under a high. The location of this high has a big impact on weather conditions further north.

It’s in the perfect spot to let a trough form over the eastern states, and moist winds will produce rain over the weekend in eastern Queensland and coastal NSW.

Then a low may form off the NSW coast next week - and if it’s close enough to the coast then that’s our next area of wild weather.