It feels like the seasonal switch has already been flicked in the eastern states.
Frosty mornings from one of the coldest starts to winter in decades have given way to sunshine and remarkably high temperatures for August
But is it a sign of what is to come for spring?
The Bureau of Meteorology's (BOM) official spring outlook has been released, offering some clues as to what is in store for Australia over the next three months.
Let us break it down.
Warmer temperatures for most of Australia
There is always an element of uncertainty about predicting future weather – particularly as far out as three months.
So, the long-range outlook deals in odds.
To work out these, it runs a model 99 times, each with slightly different starting conditions, and looks at the range of outcomes and how popular they are.
This spring it is putting strong odds on warmer than normal temperatures – both maximums and minimums – across the majority of Australia.
This is particularly likely for the northern half of the country, upwards from Queensland.
"The temperature forecast is more confident, especially over northern Australia where there is a very high chance of above average temperatures," BOM climatologist Zhi-Weng Chua said.
Tasmania and Victoria's south coast are also strongly favoured to be warmer than normal this spring.
However, given that it's still a relatively cool time of year in those areas, it may not be quite as noticeable.
Southern Western Australia and a small region around Sydney are the exceptions to the warm spring signal. In those areas, the outlook is less certain.
So that means, averaged across the three months from September to November, it's likely most of Australia will come out warmer than the long-term average.
But there could be days or weeks of cold weather mixed amongst there too.
"It's always something to keep in mind, that there could be days or weeks that it's cooler than average or cold, but with this kind of forecast you expect more periods of warmer than average weather over the season," Mr Chua said.
"And, especially over northern Australia and Tasmania, there is more chance of getting those more extreme or unusually warm spells as well."
The below map shows how the "chance of extremes" looks in BOM's forecast. Most of tropical Australia and Tasmania are three to four times as likely to be "unusually warm" this spring than normal.
Wetter spring for east possible
The rainfall outlook for eastern Australia has become somewhat clearer in the past week.
For southern Queensland, northern New South Wales and eastern Tasmania it's now leaning slightly towards a wetter than usual season ahead.
Meanwhile, the sparsely populated inland part of Western Australia is being tipped to be drier than normal.
"It does seem the model has shifted to a wetter outlook over eastern Australia, and we also saw this wetter outlook in some of the international models earlier in the month," he said.
"So it does give us some confidence that there is something being picked up by these long-range forecast models that wetter conditions are more likely over eastern Australia."
But Mr Chua said it was still not as clear as it was for temperature.
"It's more likely than usual to have above average rainfall, especially over southern and central Queensland, but the outlook is still showing a range of scenarios," he said.
"So we're leaning toward the wetter scenario, but there's still the possibility of other scenarios happening."
For the rest of the country, the model hasn't really given a clear signal either way for rainfall this spring.
"Where it's not confident is most of Victoria, south-west WA, western Tasmania and most of the northern territory, where there's a range of spring rainfall [outcomes] being represented in the models," Mr Chua said.
Why isn't the rainfall outlook as clear as previous years?
The lack of clarity in the outlook this spring is very different to recent years.
The 2023 and 2019 spring outlooks, for instance, placed firm bets on below-average rainfall for most of Australia, along with warmer-than-unusual temperatures.
While 2022, 2021 and 2020 all strongly tipped a wet spring for most of the eastern half of Australia.
Mr Chua said many factors influenced the outlook, making it hard to pinpoint exactly why this spring was different.
But he said one likely factor was that there was no strong indication of how the Indian Ocean Dipole and ENSO were going to play out, like they were in previous years.
"We know that these, historically, have a link to rainfall impacts over Australia," he said.
"Even though they're not the only factor in the outlook, having them forecast as neutral over spring is likely to contribute to the odds not being so emphatic.
"But we don't know for sure, as ENSO and IOD have variability in their impact as well as complexity in their interaction with other influences on the climate."
