Just look at that huge northwest cloudband crossing the country like a massive diagonal sash.

The moisture-laden cloudband has delivered significant rain from Western Australia's Kimberley district, through to the Red Centre, and all the way down to southeastern SA.

READ MORE: WHAT IS A NORTHWEST CLOUDBAND?

Some of the totals from this system to 9 am Thursday include:

• 62.2 mm at Broome on WA's Kimberley coast, the highest daily May rainfall in four years and a welcome top-up after a wet season with well below-average rainfall (see the graph at the bottom of this page).
• 28 mm at Alice Springs, which was the highest daily May rainfall in 20 years. It was also the city's first rain in 53 days after an exceptionally wet March which saw the Todd River flood. Alice Springs saw 226.2 mm of rain in March spread across 10 rain days.
• Falls of 5 to 10 mm across the Adelaide metropolitan area with 6.6 mm in the city, and slightly heavier falls of 10 to 15 mm in the Adelaide Hills. While not exceptionally heavy, this rain has at least prevented the parched SA capital from registering its driest May on record, after just 0.6 mm of rain fell in May 2024 before today.

The cloudband now continues its eastwards march, with rain and showers spreading into western Victoria and southwest NSW.

Virtually all of Victoria and Tasmania can expect to see rain from later today into Friday, with most of New South Wales getting wet on Friday into Saturday with severe weather warnings in some areas.

There's much more rain and some wild weather in store for coastal New South Wales due to an East Coast Low which will form later this weekend, but that's a different weather system.

For now, it's all about that northwest cloudband which is dominating Australian weather charts on a scale which few other weather systems do.

Parts of Tasmania have been exceptionally dry to date in 2024, but moisture originating in the Indian Ocean off northwest WA is about to help with that as it streams thousands of kilometres across the continent.