Melbourne sweltered through its hottest night in history on Monday night, as forecasters keep a close eye on a cool change expected to pass through before 9am.
The mercury reached 32.3C and stayed there for most of the night across the city, and despite a light sea breeze, temperatures soared back to 33C by 7am.
The previous record was reached on February 1, 1902 when the minimum temperature was 30.6C.
Weather bureau duty forecaster Stuart Coombs said a weak sea breeze had brought temperatures down between Geelong and Avalon, but the head had increased through the early hours.
He said there was quite a bit of variability especially in the outer suburbs, but generally it was a very hot one.
He also said that a change this morning was expected to change the direction of the wind to the west, but it wouldn’t do much to drop temperatures.
A cloud mass reaching to the north is most likely to bring showers, but nothing significant for the catchments.
Meanwhile, over 30,000 customers have suffered power cuts after the extreme weather caused distribution transformers to overheat.
Jemena and United Energy customers in the south east of Melbourne and the Mornington Peninsula endured rolling outages from late afternoon on Monday.
At 7am on Tuesday power had been restored to more than 25,000 customers and about 2,200 were waiting to be reconnected.
A spokesman for the two power companies said the problem worsened overnight but only about 200 customers were affected at a time.