Heavy rain, severe weather forecast for NSW

The Bureau of Meteorology has issued multiple flood warnings across NSW with more torrential rain forecast across the weekend.

Transcript

00:00 The situation we have today and going into Saturday is for a significant weather system

00:04 and it's affecting eastern New South Wales and central parts of the New South Wales coast.

00:08 The focus really is on today and into Saturday with the good news being that this system will

00:15 move southeast and out into the Tasman Sea during Sunday. That said, during today we've

00:22 updated the severe weather warning for areas of the coast from Newcastle down to the south coast

00:29 towards Bega and inland in an arc capturing towns like Putty and Oberon, Goulburn and

00:38 Braidwood I think is the other one and other towns in amongst that area. So they're all

00:43 captured in the severe weather warning. The severe weather warning is for rain, heavy rain and

00:50 likely intense falls. The focus on that is that yesterday that was actually considered to be

00:57 starting more later Friday but the severe weather warning has now brought that forward to starting

01:01 now. So we'll start to see more rain from now into Friday night and into Saturday. The intense

01:08 rainfall as Commissioner York mentioned is the driver for likely flash flooding whereas the

01:15 broader rain is for the effects on riverine flooding. Right now we haven't seen a lot of

01:21 riverine response in the severe weather warning area but that'll be the focus of our attention

01:28 over the next 24 to 48 hours. As far as rainfall goes we're expecting six hourly rainfalls of 50

01:34 to 90 millimetres with 130 millimetres over the Hillawarra escarpment quite possible. 24-hour

01:42 totals of 200 to 300 millimetres are also possible in some locations. From a wind perspective,

01:48 you know we're talking about easterly winds averaging 60 to 70 kilometres with gusts of up

01:52 to 90 kilometres so they're damaging winds. From a point of view of how that looks over the next 24

01:58 to 48 hours we will have severe weather and the flow-on effect will be into catchments in the

02:05 south of Newcastle down to the south coast. From an observations point of view, Sydney overnight

02:12 up to about now has received a bit over 100 millimetres of rain in less than 24 hours. Most

02:17 of that falling this morning and areas around Wentworth Falls, Falcon Bridge, Penrith are

02:23 receiving more than 75 millimetres in that same period. The Wollongong escarpment and around Lake

02:29 Hillawarra have already captured around 50 to 80 millimetres in different locations.