February 2022 Weather Report

 The overall summary of the month changed quite a lot in the last week of the month.  Until 23 February the temperature anomaly was negative (ie below average temperatures) and the rain was very little.  In the last few days the temperature has risen and the rainfall is well above long term mean and median.  Not  surprisingly it was also humid!  Hola La Niña!

Caveat

Note that in the process of moving to a new ACER computer  - much better than the Dell I have suffered with for the past 2 years - I lost data for 3 days (15-17 February). I have incorporated key values from the BoM site to plug the gap.  Also the BoM station was hors de combat for 3 days and WS values have been used instead.  Not perfect, but IM(H?)O fit for purpose.

Rainfall

Quite a few of the daily falls are trivial so wouldn't show up on a column chart.  The best illustration of rainfall is the cumulant through the month.  This can be presented simply using daily totals ...

.. or with greater precision using hourly data.  

The longest vertical line shows the impact of the 19.6mm recorded in the hour from 10:00 am on 26 February.  That is the 5th heaviest hourly fall I have recorded here: of the 4 others 2 were consecutive hours (2200 and 2300) on 23 March 2021 totalling 49.4 mm.

We ended the month with 89.2 mm which is well above last year and the long term median.  (Also above the long term mean, despite quite a few February falls >100mm.)

Progress of my pro-rata annual estimate is interesting.  This is the second year in a row where there has been a large fall in the first half of January putting the estimate at daft levels early in the year.

Temperatures

My basic measure of temperature is the anomaly (difference to long-term mean.

This shows how after a very hot start to the month it dropped rapidly before gradually building up again to finish the month with an average temperature 0.14C above the long term value.

The next chart shows the comparison of BoM data with the ling term averages for each day.

On this comparison the month ended with the minima 0.69C above average while the maxima worked out to 0.42C below average.

My Weather Station shows a similar pattern, with maxima as usual somewhat higher on many days due to less exposure to afternoon sea breezes.  (But note opening caveat about technology fails!)

Minimum Temperatures

The average minimum temperature for February 2022 was well below the value for January 2022 but above both the value for February 2021 and the average February value.

While the trend line for the time series does slope upwards the low value of r2 shows this not to be significant.  Removing the very low value for 1996 does not increase the value of r2!

Maximum Temperatures

The average maximum temperature was below the average but a little above last year.

The time series chart resembles a cross section through the Andes and as would be expected from such a chart there is no significant trend.  Indeed the regression line of best fit is about as close to flat as could be imagined! 

Having now got at least three WS observations for each month I thought it might be worth exploring a chart of the current month against the average for the weather station alone.  On attempting this, the current year and the average for both months of 2022 were so close the line overlaid each other.  Lets see what happens with March!

Humidity

The month felt quite humid confirmed by average readings for both 0900 and 1500 hrs being well above average for the month.  

Daily values  for those times were also quite high with the 1500 value often being close to the 0900 reading.

Wind

This variable is particularly difficult to assess for the month as 

• readings for my WS and the BoM are rather different, due to the greater exposure of the BoM site; and 
• the readings for the BoM site are missing for some days.

However, looking at the maximum wind gust data available from BoM suggests that the days lost from my WS were not abnormal.  Thus I have taken the average wind run for the 25 days for which WS data is available as a reasonable indicator of windiness.

This suggests an unremarkable month for wind.  Almost exactly average for daily run.  That being said the run of 284 km on 20 February was the 4th longest February run (of 101 readings) but only the 31st longest run (of 1116) runs overall all months in which my WS has been operating.