It's not often that any Australian state or territory has two locations with temperatures that are separated by 30°C or more at any given point in time.

But that has been the situation in New South Wales for several hours on Friday afternoon, with weather stations in the state's northeast and southeast separated by 30 degrees or more. For example, at 1 pm:

• Casino, in the Northern Rivers, was sitting on 28.5°C
• Thredbo Top Station, down in the Snowy Mountains, was –3.0°C
• That's a gap of 31.5°C. Which is a lot!
• If you're interested (and you're a Weatherzone reader so we know you are), the average August top temps in Casino and Thredbo respectively are 22.7°C and 0.5°C. So that's a 22.2°C gap, on average.

Meanwhile at 3 pm, when we took the screen grab of live temperatures in the image below, Thredbo Top tation was hovering on –2.1°C, while Casino was on 28.0°C, a gap of 30.1°C.

That gap of 30 degrees or more has persisted for at least three hours.

Why such a difference in temps in just one medium-sized Australian state? 

A cold front passed through southern parts of NSW overnight, bringing snow to the mountains, showers and a few storms here and there, while also dropping maximum temps several degrees on Friday compared to Thursday. 

For example, Canberra (OK, technically in the ACT but encircled on all sides by southern NSW) had a maximum of 15.9°C yesterday but has not yet nudged 13°C today, and probably won't.

That cool air has not yet quite penetrated to the far north-east corner of the state, but it's not too far off, and will arrive later today or overnight, with weekend top temps at most spots in the northeast (below the tablelands) expected to reach the low twenties on Saturday and only the high teens on Sunday. 

So for now, NSW has a pretty interesting statewide weather situation happening. Is there anything like this happening in any other state or territory?

If you pan out and look at temperatures across Australia, you can see a gap of about 21 degrees between the warmest (up north) and coolest (down south) parts of Western Australia.

Victoria has a gap approaching 20 degrees between its ski resort weather stations at places like Mt Hotham, and the weather station up in the state's northwest in Mildura.

No other state has a differential of more than about 12 to 15 degrees between the warmest and coolest spots concurrently. 

Whatever you're up to this weekend and whether you like it hot or cold, we hope the weather is kind to you.