You've got to hand it to Melbourne: sweltering hot one day, freezing the next.
Few Aussie cities endure such dramatic changes in the weather.
Just a few days ago it was beach weather. Warm and sunny, like you expect summer to be.
Then this morning we stepped out into a bitterly cold wind, showers and even some small, winter-like hail rattling the windows.
There's been a dusting of snow on the alpine peaks.
It was around 30 degrees Celsius mid-Sunday morning.
Today, just after 10am, it was a biting 10C. Factor in the wind, it felt like 5 !
Next week will be cool, but not as cold as today
We had a number of "out-of-season" snowfalls at the Victorian resorts through October and November.
A lot more than normal, and using averaged mean maxima across all of the Bureau of Meteorology's weather stations, Spring in Melbourne was our coldest for 21 years.
We even had our equal-coldest November day on record on the 15th.
So it's unlikely there'll be a huge turn around in December.
The culprits for the icy blasts have been very cold air masses dragged up from near the Antarctic by deep lows travelling mostly to the south of Victoria, frequently off the coast of Tasmania.
They're often aided by very cold air moving up in the higher levels of the atmosphere.
The forecast synoptic set-up has another cool spell heading for us early next week, although at this stage it won't be quite as chilly as it has felt today.
But are these wild swings in temperature all that uncommon in the first month of the Australian summer?
Last December, Melbourne's maximum temperature ranged from a scorching 37.7C to a high of just 16C.
So maybe today's icy blast isn't all that much of an anomaly.
Indian Ocean Dipole moving into neutral, as La Niña on the wane
Australia has been under the effect of a negative Indian Ocean Dipole, which can affect our weather.
It's one of our climate drivers, like La Niña.
It usually results in wetter-than-normal conditions and an increased chance of extreme rain events.
And all of that rain cloud keeps down the amount of heating from the Sun at the Earth's surface.
But the Bureau of Meteorology has declared that the IOD has now moved into a neutral phase, so it'll have little impact one way or the other.
It has also been predicted that we'll have another summer impacted by La Niña. But it, too, seems to on the wane.
If that happens we could be back to our usual Victorian summer conditions — something Melbournians would look forward to on a day like this.
