Australian towns blanketed with rare snow in wild weather

Several towns in eastern Australia were blanketed with their thickest layer of snow in decades as wild weather swept the area this weekend, causing floods, stranding vehicles and cutting power to thousands of homes, authorities said.
A cold air front dropped as much as 40 cm of snow on parts of northern New South Wales on Saturday, the most since the mid-1980s, said Miriam Bradbury, a meteorologist at Australia’s weather bureau.
Snow also settled in areas of the neighbouring state of Queensland for the first time in 10 years, she said.
Bradbury said climate change has made Australia’s weather more volatile in recent years but that this sort of event had occurred several times in the historical record.
“What makes this event unusual is how much snow we had but also how widespread, covering quite a large part of the northern tablelands,” she said.