Residents in Tasmania woke up to snow (pictured) while the rest of the country sweltered through a heatwave
Residents in Tasmania woke up to snow (pictured) while the rest of the country sweltered through a heatwave
While parts of Australia sweltered through the hottest November on record, regions in Tasmania woke to a dusting of summer snow.

Tuesday night's blustery cold front brought falls to the summit of Hobart's Mount Wellington and elevated areas of the central highlands on the first and second day of summer.

Great Lake Hotel duty manager Truen Johns said sleet in the early evening turned to snow which was several inches deep by the morning.

'I woke up to everything covered in white,' he said.

Bureau of Meteorology's Tristan Oakley explained that Tasmania's low pressure system is what led the state to miss out on the heatwave over the weekend.


'We have a low pressure system moving through Bass Strait and that's pushed a rain band especially over the northern parts of the state overnight and through Sunday morning,' he told the Tasmania Examiner.

'Everywhere else across the country they don't have this low pressure system. They've had quite strong north-west to northerly winds which has dragged warm air from central Australia to northern parts of Victoria and into New South Wales.

Great Lake Hotel duty manager Truen John woke up to see and saw the snow outside his hotel (Pictured)
Great Lake Hotel duty manager Truen John woke up to see and saw the snow outside his hotel (Pictured)
'In this situation, because the low pressure system actually formed pretty much over Victoria, we were spared that really strong north-west and northerly wind that would've brought that heat down.'

Sydney and parts of NSW had a scorching weekend, with the mercury passing 40C in many areas.

'It's the other side of the coin really. You get hot air in one spot and it pushes cold air into another spot,' the Bureau of Meteorology's Anna Forrest said.

'The contrast between the hot air on the mainland and the cold air down here gave us the wind.'

The past weekend was Australia's hottest spring on record with a mean temperature of 24.53C, or 2.03C higher than average.

It's well above the increase of 1.81C noted in 2014, according to the Bureau of Meteorology.

Spring nights were also on average the hottest they have been in more than two decades, with the mean minimum temperature 17.1C or 1.91C above average, surpassing the 1998 record of 1.46C.

On an individual state level, the 2020 season was amongst the six warmest springs on record for all states and the Northern Territory.

(Read more here)