In January, it rained heavily in outback Queensland.

You can see that illustrated two really interesting ways in this story: one is through the Bureau of Meteorology's monthly anomaly map, which is below.

As you can see, all of far western Queensland had above-average rainfall – with large areas experiencing more than 200% of the norm, and small areas even receiving triple (300% of) the usual January rain.

Source: BoM.

Overall, most of western Queensland saw between 50 mm and 200 mm in January. The result?

The intermittent streams and river of western Queensland have again started flowing southwards towards Lake Eyre (which they may or may not reach). And that's what our next image shows.

We're talking about rivers like the Georgina, the Diamantina and Cooper Creek, the latter two of which flow directly into the Lake Eyre basin.

The Georgina River is a tributary of the Diamantina, and it's the Georgina that is clearly visible on the top central portion of the images below, which come via the NASA Worldview satellites. Lake Eyre is the blue blob on the bottom left.

Image: Dry, wet, wetter. Source: NASA Worldview.

Take a good look at the trio of images above. The first one is from January 12. The middle pic was Feb 6. The right-hand image was taken today, February 11. See the difference? Here today, nowhere to be seen a month ago.

There's one other aspect of that trio of images which is worth mentioning. Note how the land is much greener on the latest image (to the right). You can even see a very slight difference in the last two images which are only a few days apart.

The green is an enhanced image effect, so outback Queensland is not actually glowing a lime colour right now. But the colour is representative of the fact that native grass and herbs are flourishing across the rain-replenished landscape.

Rain really does do wonderful things for this dry continent. That said, we hope you manage to catch a few hours of cloudless skies if you're planning outdoors activities this weekend. Type in your postcode on our home page for forecasts and more info.