Some nice lightning pics there for a winter storm. As for the confusion about snow or not just came across this on the smh website. So I guess it doesn't quite break any records....
It looked like snow, and it felt like snow, but in what may come as a disappointment to Sydneysiders, the winter whiteness was just soft hail.
Just after 3.30pm (AEST) Sunday afternoon the area around Lindfield, Roseville and Killara became blanketed in white as a thunderstorm brought a winter wonderland to parts of northern Sydney.
"It's given a very European feel to Roseville," one Roseville woman told the Seven Network.
"I think the snow here is better than Perisher," a man from the same suburb told the ABC.
But despite some hope that metropolitan Sydney had experienced its first recorded snowfall since 1836, the Bureau of Meteorology said northern Sydney had just been blanketed in hail.
"It was soft hail," senior forecaster Peter Zmijewski said.
"Snow has a different appearance - snow falls in flakes."
Mr Zmijewski said Sydney experienced a white winter afternoon because it was cold enough to stop the hail melting as it fell and cold enough to preserve it when hit the ground.
The mercury fell to around 10 degrees in metropolitan Sydney on a wet and windy afternoon.
Temperatures need to plummet to around two degrees to produce snow, he said.
"We get hail in the middle of summer, but today's hail is because it is cold enough that it just didn't melt on the way down, so it fell as a soft, melting ice," he said.
Mr Zmijewski doubted the 1836 snow report, saying weather observers of the era lacked the expertise of today.
"We are almost in the sub-tropics in Sydney," he said.
"Two hundred years ago they may not have been that well trained and it was probably small hail.
"Places like the far west, the Blue Mountains, you can get snow. But to get it in the eastern half of Sydney you would be pushing very hard."
