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.