A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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southerly buster
A southerly buster is an abrupt cold front that arrives on the southeast Australian coast in summer, usually in the late afternoon, replacing a hot northwesterly with a violent southerly gale in a matter of minutes. The temperature can drop twenty degrees, the wind can shift 180 degrees and gust over fifty knots, and a roll of dark cloud arrives ahead of it.
Etymology
The name is Australian and the second half uses buster in the sense of something that arrives with force. It is the counterpart of the brickfielder, which is the hot northwesterly that precedes it, and the two are a single weather sequence with two names, in which the brickfielder builds the heat and the buster ends it.