But senior forecaster Dean Stewart declined to call the weather event a tornado.

“Usually if you have a tornado, you have a much narrower path of damage, whereas that looks fairly widespread from the SES reports of where the damage occurred across Wodonga,” Mr Stewart said.

“It wasn’t just localised into a couple of streets, it was quite widespread across the area, which suggests it was more of a downburst from the thunderstorm, the wind spreading out once it comes down to the ground.”

The storm came through just after 5pm on Monday, with strong wind and rain bringing down trees and power lines across Wodonga.

Mr Stewart said the Albury airport monitoring site recorded wind gusts of 82 kilometres an hour and 3.2 millimetres of rain, but other areas would have received higher levels.

“There were numerous storms, it wasn’t just one thunderstorm, there was basically a line of thunderstorms extending from southern NSW into North East Victoria and in fact even down as far south as Gippsland during that afternoon.

“They intensified as they ran into that more humid air in the North East.

“When you’ve got high humidity, that can assist the development of the storms, that’s one of the ingredients, along with the front coming across.”

Temperatures dropped from the mid 30s down to 23 degrees within an hour.

Mr Stewart said Mount Buffalo received 25mm of rain and Bright 15mm.