January was a month of impressive temperature contrasts in Australia. During the opening week of 2020, a pulse of hot air caused a spate of maximum temperature records in NSW. This included a whopping 48.9 degrees at Penrith in Western Sydney, which is the highest temperature ever recorded in any suburb of an Australian capital city.

But while temperatures were soaring in NSW during the opening week of 2020, cooler air combined with a blanket of cloud and rain caused parts of SA and Victoria to experience their coldest January day on record. This included maximum temperatures 15.9 degrees at Woomera and 17.5 degrees at Ceduna, two sites that have data available back to the 1940's.

Despite these contrasting temperatures across Australia, last month's national mean temperature was 1.45 degrees above the long-term average, making it the country's third warmest January in 111 years of records.

The first month of 2020 also saw some welcome rain returning to parched parts of the country. Rainfall during January was 12 percent above the long-term average for Australia as a whole, making this the country's first wetter-than-average month since November 2018.

Image: Enhanced water vapour satellite image showing thunderstorms over parts of northern and eastern Australia on January 16th, 2020.

At the state level, Victoria, Western Australia and Queensalnd all registered a wetter-than-average month as well. But while some parts of southeastern Australia saw decent rain, NSW and the Murray Darling Basin only picked up about two-thirds of their average January rainfall. Unfortunately, these areas need multiple months of above-average rain to break out of this multi-year drought.

Image: Rain declies during January 2020. Source: Bureau of Meteorology

Looking ahead, the opening fortnight of February is likely to see widespread rain in northern and eastern Australia. Some of this rain will fall in drought-affected areas of Queensland and NSW and it will help extinguish some of the fires burning in southeastern Australia.

Looking more broadly at the next three months, seasonal forecast models suggest that there are roughly equal chances of above and below-average rainfall across most of the country between February and April.

This outlook does not mean that near-average rainfall is likely. Instead, it simply means that, in the absence of any strong climate drivers like El Nino and the Indian Ocean Dipole, rainfall could go either way.

Models are more confident that temperatures will be warmer-than-usual for most of Australia during the rest of summer and into early autumn. This doesn't mean that every day will be hot, but on balance temperatures are likely to be higher than the long-term norm when averaged out over the next three months.