The daily weather log

Nearly all of the welcome rain this month fell on only four days. Most of it (55 mm) was steady soaking rain through the 20th and 21st. At Tamworth airport there was rain in every hour for 37 hours.

Daily average temperatures were close to normal for August, rising slowly from 11 to 15 degrees. There were wild swings in daily maxima and minima, though. In the first half of the month, with clear skies nearly every morning, days were very warm, mainly above 20 degrees, and nights were cold, hovering around zero. There was seldom frost on the grass because the air was extremely dry. Two days had extreme temperature ranges: over 22 degrees.
That desert-like weather suddenly stopped. The overcast, rainy days from the 16th to the 21st had day-time and night-time temperatures that were almost the same. One night was 10° warmer than normal, and one day was 8.5° cooler than normal.
After the rain, the days slowly warmed up, the nights cooled down, and the skies cleared, until the 30th was desert-like again.

 Comparing August months

Compared with Augusts since 2000, this August had the warmest nights by far: 5.2° compared to an average of 3.2°. This raised the daily mean temperature as well, so that it was also the warmest. However, daily maximum temperatures were not as high as they were in 2002. The August of 2001 was colder than the others; its daily maxima were especially cold.

This month was cloudy (35% mornings >4 octas) and humid (mean morning dew point 3.9°) as well as rainy.  Manilla’s total rainfall of 81 mm this month is in the 90th percentile: the fourteenth wettest August on record. Rainfall totals for more than one month are near normal.

Data. Rainfall data is from Manilla Post Office, courtesy of Phil Pinch. Dew point values before August 2005 are from Tamworth Airport 6 am data supplied by the Bureau of Meteorology. Temperature and other data are from 3 Monash Street, Manilla.