This post is the sixth in a set for the 12 calendar months. Graphs are sixteen-year logs of the monthly mean anomaly values of nine climate variables for Manilla, NSW, with fitted trend lines. I have explained the method in notes at the foot of the page.

Raw anomaly values for August

Extreme values of August anomalies in this period were:

Temperature range anomaly (minus) +4.1 deg: August 2010;
Dew Point Anomaly -4.5 deg: August 2012.

Trend lines for August

Heat Indicators

The trend of mean temperature anomalies was almost constant. The trend of daily maximum temperature anomalies was almost constant, but had a weak minimum at 2007. The trend of minimum temperature anomaly had a weak minimum in 2001 and a weak maximum in 2010. The subsoil temperature anomaly trend ended very high, after a weak minimum in 2005.

Moisture indicators

The Moisture Index trend line had a trough in 2004 followed by a peak in 2009. The cloudy days anomaly trend was more curved, with a low trough in 2003 and a high peak in 2011. The temperature range anomaly (minus) trend began a little low and had a broad low peak around 2009. The rainfall anomaly trended only slightly down, while the dew point anomaly began high, paused near zero, and ended very low. Note that cloudiness and dew point, which began together, ended far apart.

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Notes.

Anomaly values

Each data point is an anomaly value that is the difference between  the mean value for a month and the normal value for that calendar month. Normals are based on the decade beginning March 1999, except that rainfall normals are based on 125 years from 1883.
Raw anomaly values vary a lot from month to month, and different variables often do not move in the same sense.
(Raw values for variables in a given month are in a report for that month. Look for the report for a given month in the “Archive” for the month following it.)

Heat Indicators

Four of the anomalies of variables are grouped as indicators of the anomaly of sensible heat at the site: daily maximum air temperature, daily minimum air temperature, daily mean air temperature (mean of maximum and minimum) and subsoil temperature (at 750 mm).

Moisture Indicators

The anomalies of five more variables are grouped as moisture indicators relating to latent heat rather than sensible heat. They are: rainfall total (mm), percent cloudy mornings (>4 octas), early morning dew point,  daily temperature range (minus), and a composite measure called “Moisture Index”. For plotting, the observed anomaly values of percent cloudy mornings have been divided by ten and the observed anomalies of monthly total rainfall in millimetres have been divided by twenty. In the same way, the moisture index is calculated as:

MI = ((Rf anom/20)+(%Cloudy anom/10)+(DP anom)+(-(TempRange anom)))/4

Trend lines

Changes in raw anomaly values are very large from year to year and show no clear pattern. To reveal a pattern calls for trend lines to be fitted.
When I fit linear trend lines, they have almost no meaning. They have R-squared values around 0.01! That is, linear trend lines “explain” hardly any of the variation. When I fit trend lines that are parabolic, cubic, or quartic the R-squared value goes up, until it is around 0.3 for quartic trends. (Quartic trends “explain” about 30% of the variation.) Beyond quartic functions, there are not enough data points to justify fitting the trend line.
Quartic trend lines can identify up to three local extreme points, whether maxima or minima, if they exist in the data.