Weather of early August

 My monitoring of daily extreme temperatures (ie daily minimum and maximum) has been very interesting for the first 5 days of August 2022.  On all 5 days both measures have been well above the long term average for the date.

Following discussion on a weather chat group a simple way of summarising temperatures is to compare the current values of the average temperature with a longer term mean value of the average temperature.  As most sources quote the daily extreme temperatures rather than the average daily temperature an indicator of average temperature is calculated by  (current daily max + current daily min) / 2.  A similar bit of arithmetic - but obviously with more periods involved - is used to calculated the longer term mean.

So I calculated the average temperature for the period 1-5 August 2022 as 14.03C.  The average for the first 5 days of August for all years since 2001 was 10.82C, 3.1C lower.  Plotting the average for each year gives the following.

Clearly early August 2022 has been unusually warm (but not as much so as August 2011.

The other interesting aspect of the weather this year has been the rainfall.  We are now up to 883mm for year, and thus just over the median annual rainfall despite only being 218 days into the year.  My prorata estimate suggests that if things carry on as they have we'll score 1477 mm for the year.  Should that happen it would be our wettest year since records began here in 1975 (~30mm more than the current record of 1442mm in 1985).