Cyclone Kirrily is expected to be declared overnight or early on Wednesday morning, according to the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM), as the slow-moving system tracks towards the Queensland coast.
The system is forecast to make landfall late on Thursday between Cardwell and Airlie Beach as a category two cyclone and is currently 760 kilometres east-north-east of Townsville.
A cyclone watch area extends from Cairns to Ayr, excluding Cairns but including Townsville, Mackay and St Lawrence.
There is a warning zone from Ayr to Mackay, including Mackay, Bowen and the Whitsunday Islands.
"Those communities can expect impacts in the next 24 to 48 hours and we're asking them to stay up to date," BOM forecaster Laura Boekel said.
Damaging wind gusts of up to 120kph are expected to impact the Whitsunday Islands from late Wednesday afternoon, and mainland communities between Townsville and St Lawrence on Wednesday night and into Thursday morning.
On Thursday, destructive wind gusts of up to 155kph could develop about coastal and island communities between Cardwell and Proserpine, including Townsville and the Whitsunday Islands.
Communities from Innisfail to St Lawrence can also expect heavy rain that could lead to flash flooding on Thursday.
Ms Boekel said storm tides are expected to impact residents of Townsville and Mackay.
"The sea is expected to rise steadily up to a level well above the normal tide, with damaging waves and flooding of some low-lying areas, especially close to the shoreline," she said.
In the longer term, the system is likely to track inland and south as a deep tropical low, bringing heavy to intense rain to parts of central, western and southern Queensland.
Loading...Police Commissioner Katarina Carroll said the public should be aware there will be a cyclone crossing for the north and a major flooding event into the south of the state.
"[It] is going to be a challenging time because of the large geographic spread of this event throughout Queensland," she said.
"During the disaster season already we lost seven lives in such a short time frame. It was within two days of the last couple of events that we had, so we don't want to see that again."
Anyone from "Innisfail right down the Sunshine Coast" is being asked to stay up-to-date with current warnings.
State Disaster Coordinator and Deputy Commissioner Shane Chelepy said Queenslanders must make sure they have petrol, non-perishable food to last 72 hours, and charge power packs for their phones.
"The concern I hold for this event is not just the cyclone, it's the potential flooding we'll see post this event," he said.
"The bureau have been clear, there's a lot of rain associated with this event."
Police are asking people to reconsider travel plans this weekend, and have implored those on the road to heed warnings and avoid floodwaters.
It comes as a 41-year-old Winton man was fined $804 for allegedly driving through floodwaters north of Longreach on Sunday, ignoring two road closure signs and a physical barrier.
Loading...Seqwater advised operational releases from Somerset Dam into Wivenhoe Dam begun on Tuesday morning.
It said the low flow releases were to balance the storages across the dams and were not expected to cause the level in Wivenhoe Dam to increase by more than half a metre.
At this stage, releases from Wivenhoe Dam are not being anticipated.
Premier Steven Miles said the bill from Cyclone Jasper and the south-east Queensland storms, will likely run into the "multiple billions".
"And we're looking at a repeat of those two events over this weekend at this stage, so it could well double the impact of natural disasters," he said.
"The real challenge this time around, is the sheer amount of the state likely to experience the impacts of this tropical cyclone and then the tropical low that it's expected to weaken into.
"Massive amounts of rainfall … possibly hitting locations that have already experienced this kind of massive rainfall, localised flooding and riverine flooding.
He said some of the models were predicting more than 1 metre of rain.
"That's a massive amount of water on already saturated catchments," he said
In the state's north, rivers rose to record levels after Jasper made landfall, including the Daintree River which reached 14.85 metres, breaking its current 12.6m record, and the Barron River reached 4.4m, exceeding its 1977 3.8m record.
There were records in the south east as well, after December storms and a monsoon in January.
Many of the region's weather stations have already recorded 300 millimetres this month, with 833mm recorded at the Springbrook Road weather station, south of Beechmont.
Energy minister Mick de Brenni said there was an unrelated storm in some suburbs of south-east Queensland on Monday, which saw 213,000 lightning strikes.
He said it was one of the reasons over 40,000 people lost power.
"The second reason was there was some heat impacts on localised hardware," he said.
"A combination of high demand and heat on localised hardware saw that hardware trip to protect the system.
"There was no outages related to a lack of supply."
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