It was the location that made Bathurst's tornado unusual: meteorologist

Weatherzone's Joel Pippard said the extreme weather event happens more often than people might think.

"What usually happens is they happen out in the desert where no one's around to witness them because, obviously, they're very localised events," he said.

"It is uncommon, though, to have one happen in a populated area."

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He said tornadoes generally develop "out of what's called a supercell thunderstorm - that's quite a powerful, violent type of thunderstorm".

"What happens there is when the atmosphere is particularly unstable and set up in the right way to get a system that has inflows of both hot and cold air and that mixture makes the whole system rotate and then when that system rotates, it can form a funnel cloud which is like a tornado except it's still in the air," he said.

"As those downdrafts get stronger and stronger, once they hit the ground it forms into a tornado."

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The Bureau of Meteorology said on Thursday afternoon that the tornado was "part of a larger weather system that the Bureau of Meteorology has been warning about for the past several days that is bringing severe thunderstorms to numerous parts of NSW and the ACT".

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