Cooler and Moister

August raw anomaly data (orange)

For now, a retreat from drought is shown by lower temperature, particularly at night, and more rain. Dew point remains very low.

 Fully smoothed data (red)

The summer season, ending in February 2018, can now be fully smoothed. February has a new 21st century record [in blue] for smoothed daily maximum temperature anomaly of +1.58° [x-axis all graphs]. This is bound to be broken by smoothed values for March, and perhaps for April. The record for negative rainfall anomaly (set in the drought of July 2002) is also likely to be broken in March.

Through the summer, all three temperatures rose, and rainfall fell. Other variables were static.

Note:

Fully smoothed data – Gaussian smoothing with half-width 6 months – are plotted in red, partly smoothed data uncoloured, and raw data for the last data point in orange. January data points are marked by squares.
Blue diamonds and the dashed blue rectangle show the extreme values in the fully smoothed data record since September 1999.

Normal values are based on averages for the decade from March 1999.* They appear on these graphs as a turquoise (turquoise) circle at the origin (0,0). A range of anomalies called “normal” is shown by a dashed rectangle in aqua (aqua). For values in degrees, the assigned normal range is +/-0.7°; for cloudiness, +/-7%; for monthly rainfall, +/-14 mm.

 * Normal values for rainfall are based on averages for the 125 years beginning 1883.