Steady rain and more on the way

It's raining at a nice steady rate on the Mid North Coast, with more to come.

We've got showers predicted through to the weekend, with maximum temperatures in the mid to high teens, then a bit of flipping between cloudy, showery and fine in the days to follow.

Down at Newee Creek, they had 14mm up to 9am this morning, while in Bellingen it was about 11mm.

At 9.30am, the bellingenweather.org site run by Kevin Doye at Kombu said it was dropping from the sky at a rate of 1.6mm per hour. Twenty minutes later it had revved up to 5mm per hour.

Despite still being on the doorstep of what's looking likely to be our next La Nina episode, parts of NSW have already seen more rain this year than the last two years combined.

Both the ocean and atmosphere in the tropical Pacific Ocean region are currently displaying a typical La Nina-like pattern. Most forecast models predict that this pattern will persist in the coming months, meaning La Nina is more likely than not during the second half of 2020. The Bureau of Meteorology currently rates the likelihood of La Nina occurring in 2020 at 70 percent.

La Nina typically causes above-average rain over large areas of northern and eastern Australia during spring. In some parts of northern and eastern Australia, La Nina is also associated with above-average summer rain.

In NSW, above-average rainfall in the months ahead would continue an impressive turnaround from the remarkably dry three-year period that gripped the state between 2017 and 2019.

This year has already been much wetter than the last few years for much of NSW. The state as a whole just had its wettest winter and August since 2016, following its wettest autumn and February since 2012.

In western NSW, Condobolin received 526.8mm of rain during the first eight months of this year. This is more rain than they saw during all of 2018 and 2019 combined (379.4mm).

If La Nina does ramp up in the coming months, the rest of 2020 should continue to look very different to the last few years in NSW. There is potential that the focus in the coming months will be on floods more than fires in some parts of the state.