Weather August 2016



Notes: 

  1. The above is an image: click to enlarge it.
  2. There was a tad more rain after I sent the report to the Gazette.

August is the last month of Winter, as the BoM regard it.  I received an interesting question about Winter rainfall (discussed in the context of it always seeming to rain on Wednesdays, when an ANPS outing was scheduled).  Thus I feel provoked to do a summary of the season, in a separate post to be published soon.

Before getting on to the details of the weather. on 19 August I was struck by this radar image, which clearly showed a Front coming through:
The equivalent Doppler image is aso interesting in showing the very strong winds right along the front (but coming North-South rather than East West):
My summary of the month's weather is that it was pretty close to an average August; reasonable rain and chilly, but not disgustingly cold.

Rain

After the deluge of June and well above average fall in July, August was spot on my average recorded since 2007.
We recorded non-trivial precipitation on 9 days, spread pretty well through the month.

Temperatures

As usual the top of the green lines is the maximum and the bottom the minimum.  The red boxes show the temperature was warmer at 11pm than at 1am and the blue boxes the opposite.
 In essence the month seems to have had a couple of periods of slowly warming up, followed by a short sharp drop to remind folk it is still Winter.

Maximum temperatures were a tad up on last year, but almost on the longer term average.
The situation with the minimum temperature is the opposite: a fair bit up n the long term average for the month, but a tad cooler than last year.

Humidity

There is not really a lot to say about this attribute of the month.  It was humid on the rainy days and less so on the dry days! In comparison to the longer term averages the value for August was almost on the average, but a bit less than last year.

Wind

Rather a month of two halves with quite a few windy days in the beginning, calmer later, but building up again in the last couple of days.
In terms of longer term measures the month was again less extreme than the previous 2 and close to average.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A tour of the West (part 1)

Image
A friend from my time in the UN sent me some photos of her family trip along Route 66.  They did this is a large camperwagon rather than a Chevy Corvette (apparently the kids jacked up about being offered a trip in the trunk).  It seems to have been a very good trip for them and most interesting to see their photos.  It was also educational for me, as I found out the German for rocking chair (schaukelstuhl, since you ask). They did 7200 miles in 30 days - a pretty serious bit of distance. This made me think of the trips we did in 1981 when living in Denver.  Frances initiated that idea by getting a book about the National Parks of the West  and marking interesting places.  I then worked out a route on a Rand-McNally Road Atlas (GPS was unknown then  - as were iPhones, personal computers and the internet).  From memory, taking nearly the whole Summer school holidays we covered about 10,000 miles in 70 days.  Here, approximately,  are our routes: That map comes from Google Maps (G
Read more

Insects from pine trees

Image
This afternoon (13/1/2015) we were looking out of our sunroom and noticed a strange bit of mist.  On getting my binoculars on the case I found it to be a cloud of tens of thousand of insects.  They appeared with naked eye to be flying away, but with binoculars I thought they were circling. Here are some images In the second one it may be possible to see there are two streams coming from the top of each tree. There was a loud buzzing noise but that could just be several thousand wings. Earlier in the day Frances had been to some nearby willows and they were infested with many little black soft bodied insects.  Perhaps they shifted to the pines and were swarming? Help!! Any information welcome. A colleague, from Wamboin, had noticed a similat phenomenon, but involvng eucalypts rather than pines!  Here are the photos he took with his phone. I have consulted some expert friends.   Their responses were: I would have gone for chironomids. I recall years ago driving al
Read more

Satin Bowerbird gets ready for Lanigans Ball.

Image
Having some time to spare today I went to check the bower near "Tom Green's Seat" in the Australian National Botanic Gardens.  The bower was well occupied by what I take to be - based on the green plumage and yellow bill - a 5th or 6th year male Satin Bowerbird.  (With all these images, click on them for a bigger - unfortunately not better focused picture.  The shots were taken hand held on full zoom from about 10m distance into a fairly well shaded location.) He was very much engaged in adding to the construction. Then it seemed that another bird called from the bush above.  This led to a whole lot of activity: the most spectacular (and worst imaged) was a flash of the wings: The bird also did a fair bit of hopping around.  Given that it was still immature I called to mind the greatest traditional Irish song of all time: Diarmuid O'Leary and the Bards performing Lanigan's Ball .  This ditty refers to spending "6 long months at Brooks Academy learning
Read more