That wind that feels like you just stepped into an industrial cool room to retrieve a slab of beer for the BBQ you're not going to have this weekend because it's so freaking cold?
It's a brutal southwesterly which has been on weather charts all week and which is finally sweeping into southeastern Australia this Friday, exactly as predicted. Straight from Antarctica to you. You can almost smell the penguin poo.
It's snowing all over the place. The Australian ski resorts are situated at altitudes between about 1400 and 2000 metres above sea level and have received up to 40 cm of snow in the past 24 hours, bringing this week's totals to 60cm in the higher resorts.
But snow is falling all the way down to about 500 or 600 metres above sea level this Friday.
It's just started in Ballarat.
It's just started out the back of the Blue Mountains near Sydney.
And in Orange in the NSW central tablelands.
Cows covered in snow. Repeat: cows covered in snow.
Here's the town of Oberon, also just west of the Blue Mtns, on Friday afternoon.
But as you'd expect, the really serious snow is in the Australian Alps. Take a gander at some of these pics from the ski resorts on Friday. Thredbo looks nice.
Snow? It's strictly for the birds. (This writer is not a sexist slimebag and is talking about the emu, OK?)
Over the hill at Perisher, the snowmobile crew has got some digging work ahead of them.
If you click the above video, you'll note that Perisher has a "Snow Discovery Centre". We're not sure what you discover there but we're guessing, y'know, maybe snow.
Here's a more recent Perisher vid.
What's causing this weather? The unbelievably sexy beast of a satellite image below is from late Thursday. See that speckletacular speckled cloudmass in the Great Australian Bight? We won't bore you with meteorological mumbo-jumbo but long story short, speckled cloud means cold moist Antarctic air.
That cloudmass is pretty much parked over southeastern Australia today, so expect more snowfalls in low-lying places, loads more snow in the Alps and PLENTY more pic and weather updates here.
Meanwhile it was just 8 degrees around midday in both Canberra and Melbourne. Sydney was 14 degrees but with the wind chill it felt more like 9. Adelaide was 10, Hobart 9 and Darwin a delightful 31. Lucky buggers.