After 330 days, months of downpours and unusually cool weather, Sydney is finally staring down the barrel of a 30C day.
Wednesday is forecast to be the first day in nearly a year where temperatures are expected to top 30C at Observatory Hill, in the heart of the city, ending Sydney’s longest cool streak in over three decades.
It came amid a year of unusually cool weather, with both the La Niña and a negative Indian Ocean dipole bringing wetter conditions to the city.
The last day temperatures above 30C were recorded at Observatory Hill was on 21 February 2022. Sydney is just eight days off its longest streak of days below the temperature mark, which came between 31 December 1882 and 6 December 1883.
In a statement, Weatherzone said if Sydney makes it to 28 January without reaching 30C, it’ll officially be a new record.
While the temperature recorded at Observatory Hill hasn’t topped 30C in nearly a year, other parts of the Sydney metropolitan region have had several days of 30C or higher since February.
The lengthy streak has come at a time when other parts of the country have experienced heatwaves, particularly in Victoria and Queensland.
While the Bureau of Meteorology is forecasting 30C on Wednesday, the rest of the week looks like a return to cooler temperatures.
The CBD has remained cool because of La Niña and winds coming in from the east, Jonathan How, a BoM forecaster said.
“With La Niña, you see increased cloud cover and rain,” he said.
“2022 was Sydney’s wettest year on record, we had significant flooding in March and then again in July. It’s been a really wet and damp year.”
Normally the winds blow westerly, picking up hotter inland temperatures from the Blue Mountains as they come down into the city, but this year the winds coming into Sydney have predominantly come from the east, meaning they are cooler because of the water temperature in the Tasman.
“We need those winds from the west to heat up,” How said. “But we didn’t see that this past year, a lot of the winds were from offshore and had cooling effects.”
The cooler weather is also bucking global weather trends, with the World Meteorological Organisation announcing last week that the past eight years were the warmest on record globally.
