When will storms hit Australia — checking the hour for your town

Australia runs on a reversed calendar, which catches out visitors from the northern hemisphere every year.

October to April is the storm season — the southern summer. Peak activity falls between November and February.

The east coast — Queensland and New South Wales — sees the most severe storms in the country, including damaging hail. Brisbane and the southeast Queensland corner are particularly exposed.

The tropical north — Darwin and the Top End — has a distinct wet season from November to April, with near-daily afternoon thunderstorms of remarkable regularity. Darwin is among the most lightning-prone places on Earth.

The south — Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth — gets fewer but sometimes violent storms, often arriving with a cold front and a sharp temperature drop within minutes.

Storm season overlaps with bushfire season, and the two interact: dry lightning ignites fires, while storm downdraughts spread them unpredictably.

Most thunderstorms peak in the late afternoon and early evening, roughly 14:00–20:00 local time. The mechanism is the same everywhere: the sun heats the ground through the day, that heat feeds rising air, and the atmosphere releases it in one go.

Mornings are statistically the calmest part of the day. If you have a choice about when to be outdoors, that is the window.

There is an important exception worth knowing. Storms that organise into large clusters can survive long after sunset and roll through overnight. Overnight storms are more dangerous in practice — not because they are stronger, but because people are asleep and not watching the sky.

That is exactly why a point forecast with a real start hour beats a general outlook. Knowing a storm is due at 2 AM rather than 5 PM changes what you do about it.

Type your town into the tool below. You get the start hour, the peak, the duration, the strength of the storm signal, and separately the chance the cell slides past instead of passing overhead.

The model behind the forecast here is ACCESS (BOM) / model globalny.

The radar above is a separate thing from the forecast. It shows what is actually falling and striking right now, minute by minute, up to two hours back. When the two disagree, trust the radar for the present moment and the forecast for the hours ahead.

Will you be warned? Australia issues official warnings through Bureau of Meteorology (BOM). Emergency alerts reach phones in the affected area, but routine forecasts do not — for an ordinary storm you are relying on your own check.

• Do not disable emergency alerts in your phone settings — that is the channel that wakes you at night.
• In the open: get off high ground, open fields and beaches. Lightning strikes the highest point around.
• In a car: stay inside with the windows closed. The body shell acts as a Faraday cage.
• Not under a lone tree — a discharge can jump from the trunk to a person standing beside it.
• At home: unplug sensitive electronics if the building has no surge protection.

Do not drive into water on the road, and remember that flooding peaks after the rain stops, not during it. Water needs time to run off slopes and reach channels, so a creek can crest an hour or more after the last drop falls, under clear sky. Thirty centimetres of moving water reaches the underside of most cars; sixty floats many of them. More than half of flash-flood deaths happen in vehicles.

In an emergency call 000.

Storm timing is one thing; the wider week is another. The five-day outlook below covers temperature and the general character of each day — useful for deciding which day to travel or work outdoors in the first place.

• When will the storm end in Australia — duration and the all-clear
• Check the storm for your town