August 2026 Weather report

 Continuing the recent experience of overall mild temperatures (cool minima and warm maxima)and very little rain.  

Rainfall

Total rainfall at my Weather Station (WS) was 29.2 mm.  This is 46% of the median August fall and compares with 23.8 mm at the BoM Airport site; 21.2 mm BoM Gabo Island and 32 mm at a Wunderground site at Nungatta. The first chart shows a comparison with recent monthly falls.

The sorry picture is confirmed by looking at the falls expressed as a % of the median fall for each month and for the Year To Date.

I have also compiled my usual pro-rata estimate of the annual fall.  Not surprisingly that is showing levels well below the last two years and the trend line is not looking good.

To give a longer term comparison I have compared the pro-rata estimates for this year with those for 2019 (which ended at 548mm and the fire).  Not promising, even though this year is a little higher than 2019.

Temperatures

The overall temperature anomaly for the month was 0.68o C.  As shown in the following chart the month began with a cool spell and gradually warmed.

A time series of values of the anomaly shows it having apparently reached a local turning point, shown by the moving average, and continuing a downwards trend.

A chart of the extremes shows the contrasting behaviour of the maxima and minima.  This will be discussed further in the next two sections.  

Whenever there is an interesting result I contemplate Trewin’s Hypothesis “Any interesting statistic is probably a processing error.”  In this case I compared the daily extremes with those from the BoM Airport site.

The match with minima is excellent and the higher values of maximum for the maxima is as expected from past comparisons.  So, good stuff,

Temperature ranges

I noted that in many days the temperature range shown by my WS was well above the range of the averages.  Overall, the range was on average 2.7o C wider for 2026 than the average since 2019.  

Minimum Temperatures

The lowest temperature recorded this August was 3.7o C on the 1st.  This is the 8th lowest August minimum for my WS site with the coldest being 1.9o C (an official frost!) on 24 August 2019.  

The average minimum temperature for the month was 7.08o C, lower by 0.63o C than the average minimum for August.  This places it at the low side of the series of average minima.  

8 of the month's minima were significantly below the monthly average and 3 were significantly above the monthly average. 

As an aside, I was interested to see that 12 of the minima were recorded against 2200 hrs.  Thus using the silly BoM 0900 daily reset these temperatures would be counted against the following day!

Maximum Temperatures

The highest temperature recorded this August was 21.3o C on the 3rd.  Somewhat surprisingly, as it is not significantly above the monthly average, this is the 15th highest August maximum for my WS site with the hottest being 26.8o C on 30 August 2020.  

The average maximum temperature for the month was 18.74o C, higher by 2.00o C than the average minimum for August.  This places it at the high side of the series of average maxima a little below the 19.2o C average for August 2024.

None of the maxima for the month were significantly about the average.  The most notable feature of the monthly maxima was that there was only 1 day - the 31st! - with a below average maximum for the day of the month.

Humidity

I am using 0600 and 1400 as my standard times for the period out of Daylight Saving: while not identical to the BoM standards of 0900 and 1500 looking at my past records suggests that they are ‘close enough’ for this report.  We are not betting our homes on this stuff.

The noteworthy feature appeared to be  how many low readings there were  for the morning reading.  However on comparing to my historic series the average for the morning series (79.1%) is lower than it has been in recent years, but higher than most Augusts 2019-2023.  However the afternoon average (63.8%) is 2% below the average and is lower than all Augusts except 2019 when a rather crisp 61.7% was achieved.

Wind

My basic measure for wind using my Ecowitt station is daily average gust.  On that basis this was a rather calm month.  Way down on both average and last year.

Around the middle of the month I came across this rather strange looking shift in the wind (example shown from the 24th). 

 Marti Goodison commented that this shift to a Southerly flow had been occurring for several days (dropping the temperature as well).  Scanning the daily plots confirmed this to be a fairly common event this month.   I am struggling to work out how to depict it: watch this space in case I sort it out.

Solar

A fairly even pattern this month apart from a couple of very low days.  I wondered whether this indicated cloudiness which neither I nor BoM Airport assess.  However BoM Gabo do include a measure of cloudiness and it shows rating of 8 (total cloud cover) for the afternoon of 9 August (presaging the rain on the 10th) and ratings of 7/8th on the 15th and 25th.

Some flowers

 As should be expected after several very dry months ...

.... Flowers have been a bit light on this Sprinter.  However we (mainly Frances) have come up with a few specimens.  We begin with a walk on the path through the Davic Creek Heath.

The most obvious flowers were Hakea decurrens.

Here showing the definitive nuts.

Some were white as well as thecommon pink.

Dillwynnia sericea

Hybanthus veronii

Acacia suavolens (I think)

Hardenbergia violacea

Epacris impressa

Comesperma ericinum

We also went to the Narrows Car Park looking for Nankeen Night Herons, finding 5 of them, mainly lurking in the Pittosporum undulatum.

On Sunday we went down Old Betka Rd looking for an unusual Acacia, on which we failed.  We did locate a Platylobium parviflora (formerly P. formosum).

Ans Daviesia latifoilia.

Reflections on the Broome St Lagoon

When we got to the Broome St Lagoon on 24 August the weather was calm and gave some nice refections of the larger wading birds.  First up was a Great Egret.

The usual flock of Royal Spoonbills were nearby.  It was difficult on site to sort out the birds from their reflections for getting a count.  We ended with 17, which I have confirmed counting from the photograph on my laptop.

Here is a close up of the main body of the flock.  At point the bright sunlight hit the beak of the bird facing  us, causing it to look very pale, but we were not fooled into thinking it was a Yellow-billed Spoonbill.

 

Mallacoota weather report July 2026

 Always good to adapt a line from The Bard, in this case,  “Romeo and Juliet”:

“Nino, Nino, wherefore art thou El Nino?”

There have been a lot of mutterings in the media about the likelihood of a strong El Nino event this year.  BoM has an interesting explainer.  The interesting issue with El Nino is, as I understand it, is that it has 2 more or less linked meanings:

1. The name was sourced from community observations of very dry periods around Christmas - hence the name El Nino (the boy child in English), a reference to the birth of Jesus.

2. Climatologists have found that these events often coincided well with temperature phenomena in the Pacific.

However I believe that as the temperature effects do not always match the observed weather across the globe it is a matter of correlation rather than causation.  So what the media have been saying is that we can expect a hot dry Summer.  

Although we are still some months from Christmas I suspect the current dry, warm weather is pointing the way towards a hot dry Summer.

A note on data

As my Davis Weather Station (WS) was beginning to fail in March I acquired a new, cheaper, WS under the Ecowitt brand.  That has been a great success passing all the data checks I have applied to it. It is also brilliant being able to access the WS when in Melbourne.

However on the 21st I noticed that the system appeared to stop recording data when I turned the light on the console off when going to bed..  I sent an email to Ecowitt Australia and got a same-day response suggesting the likely cause of the issue, how to diagnose this, and some solutions.  I followed the suggestions and it has now resumed correct operation.

Very pleasing level of support.

Rainfall

As implied in the preamble this month has continued the generally woeful performance of the rain gods this year.  The total monthly fall was 25.3mm at my WS (validated by 26.4 at BoM Airport).  That was 34% of the median July fall.  Of the monthly fall 43% was provided by the 10.9mm on the 14th.

The pro-rata estimate of the annual fall shows it to be well below recent years, and the trend line of the series is looking most unhappy.

As would be expected from that tale of woe this month was well below last year and the average.  Looking at my past records (including falls at the airport site) there are only 4 (of 48) lower July falls, and 3 of the last 4 months have been well below median for the month.

Temperatures

The weather anomaly ended the month at +1.17o C.  After a rather warm start to the month the temperatures moderated somewhat.

A time series of values of the anomaly shows the moving average continuing upwards, while the trend of the moving average is on a downwards trajectory.  Interesting but I am not going to punt the farm on that evidence!

Looking at the daily extremes (see page in Google Sheet) shows that most values were above average, especially for the maximum series.  It was not until the 29th that both measures were below average on the same day (on average there would be 11 days on which that was the case.  This will be discussed in more detail below.

The daily range of temperatures was somewhat larger than average on 21 days with some very high values including 16.1o C (from 3.7o C to 19.8o C) on the 28th.

As the comparison with the average was so biased towards higher temperatures I compared the daily extremes for my WS and the BoM Airport site. 

The maximum series for my WS is a bit higher than the airport which is expected due to the cooling effect of the ocean and particularly the sea breeze at the airport site.  However the patterns are very similar, confirmed by a correlation coefficient of 0.84.  The minima are very similar except for the 31st where the WS minimum occurred at 2300hrs and is thus counted against 1 August by BoM due to the 🤬 0900 reset.  My overall conclusion is that the WS data are sound.

Minimum Temperatures

The average minimum for the month (7.12o C) is in the middle of the sets of data for the years from 2019 onwards.  The lowest temperature was 2.6o C on the 19th.

 

4 of the minima were significantly below the monthly average and 5 were significantly above.  None of the values were very significantly different to the monthly average.

Maximum temperatures

The average maximum for the month (17.26o C) was the highest July average maximum recorded at my WS since 2019 (or in the much longer series including the BoM Airport).  This is shown in the next chart. The highest  temperature was 22.6o C on the 13th and the lowest maximum 13.2o C on the 5th.

2 of the maxima were very significantly above the July average maximum and a further 10 readings were significantly above.  Only the lowest reading was significantly below average.

Humidity

As for last month I have used 0600 hrs as my standard morning time and 1400hrs as the standard afternoon time.  The daily values are shown in the following chart.

The abrupt drop on the 13th seemed somewhat anomalous so I have checked the reading for the Airport which show a value of 40%rH for 1500hrs on the 13th which allowing for the difference in location and wind exposure I see as quite comparable with the 30% recorded by my WS.  I have also downloaded the detailed (every 10 minutes) readings for the day by my WS.  These are presented in the next chart showing the steady drop in humidity through the day.  Again this indicates the WS data is sound.

Wind

The first chart shows the average and maximum gust for each day.  They correlate rather well.

The second chart compares the maximum gust for this month, June 2025 and the average June gust since 2019.  The month is very close to average.

The final wind chart is a snip from the Ecowitt system showing the direction of the wind at each of the 6 hourly readings using the Monthly protocol.

Solar

I am still working out how to analyse and present the information on solar radiation.  The first chart is pretty straightforward, showing the total watts per square metre of each day of the month.  I have added a linear trend line as it looked as though the raw series was sloping upwards. The value of r2 supports that view to a weak extent.

The second solar chart took quite a bit of mucking about to extract data for each 10 minute period and sum that for each hour for two days.  The total watts for the 4th were 1182 and for the 25th 1530.  It would seem that cloud came over around noon on 4th and a little earlier on the 25th but the latter day returned to sub\nshine.

some heath-haunting flowers (and some birds)

It being a nice day weatherwise we took ourselves off to the Davis Beach Heath to see how the flowers were doing.  Not exactly a carpet of colour but few pretties here and there.

The last couple of Springs have not been glorious floriferousness, so we have got out of the habit of identifying plants.  Which only means one thing: we have forgotten most everything. But here are some OK snaps.  I shall try to attach better names soon(ish).

Acacia suavolens

Acacia myrtifolia

A pea!

Possibly a different pea!

Allocasuarina nana (or possibly another Allocasuarina)

Comesperma volubile

Billardiera 

Goodenia ovata

Later in the afternoon I went to the Narrows Car Park to see how many Night Herons I could find.  The answer was 4: 3 flushed into the big eucalypt and one remained lurking in the Pittosporum.

This one shows a faint trace of a plume on the head.

On the way home I was impressed with the pink bill on this Pelican (and a few others of the species) in the Lake at Mullet Creek.