Canberra facing hottest day in almost five years

Things are heating up in the national capital and with parliament currently in summer recess, you can’t blame the hot air coming out of Parliament House.

Canberra should reach 38°C or 39°C on Monday. If it tops 38°C, that would make it the city’s hottest day in almost five years.

• Canberra’s hottest day to date in 2024 was November 25, when the mercury reached 35.3°C.
• The hottest day of 2023 was March 19, with 37.4°C.
• The last time Canberra’s temperature reached 38°C was January 25, 2021, when the mercury peaked at exactly 38.0°C.
• Canberra’s last day above 40 degrees was February 1, 2020, with a scorching 42.7°C.
• The day mentioned above was of course during the Black Summer and came just four weeks after Canberra endured its hottest recorded day, with 44.0°C on January 4, 2020.

As you can see on the map below, Canberra will be in the “severe heatwave” zone early next week as heatwave conditions grip parts of northern, central, and eastern Australia.

Image: Heatwave situation for Sunday, Monday, & Tuesday (3 days starting 15/12/2024). Source: BoM.

The really hot weather will kick in on Sunday (max 36°C) and persist until Tuesday (max 35°C).

Nights will also be warm, and the period from Monday night into Tuesday morning promises to be a real stinker by Canberra standards, with a minimum of 22°C predicted.

That would be Canberra’s warmest night of the year by far – and it comes less than two months after the capital saw frost, with a low of –1.3°C on October 26.

Why hasn’t Canberra seen extreme heat since 2020?

After the Black Summer of 2019/20, three consecutive summers that featured La Niña (for all or part of the season) were part of the reason behind Canberra’s lack of summer heat extremes, as the typically cloudy weather associated with La Niña tends to moderate maximum temps.

As of this week, the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is currently in the neutral range. The absence of La Niña doesn’t automatically mean dry weather and heat, and nor does it mean it won’t rain.

Indeed, Canberra has seen its two heaviest 24-hour rainfall days of 2024 this December, with 40.4mm on the 1st and 48.6mm on the 7th.

For a city known for its cold, Canberra is racking up some other meteorological extremes (by local standards) in December 2024.