May Weather report

Even Dr. Pangloss would have trouble rating this "the best of all possible months".  Winter has arrived (and it is still officially Autumn).

Rain unfortunately has not arrived.  We totaled 12.3mm over the month, occurring in two miserable spells around 14 and 22 May.  Well below average, even allowing for this being our dryest season.
(Despite this pathetic effort by J. Pluvius there is still water flowing in the Cotter Catchment so that the old dam has disappeared.)

Winter = cold.  I apologise to Jeni for the awful truth in that statement and hope she didn't get too frozen on her visit here.
We had 10 air frosts (minimum below 0c) and 20 air frosts (temperature below 2).  7 maxima were above 20C and 8 below 15C.  The daily ups and downs are such that no significant trend could be dragged out of these data but visually-challenged Frederick can see that the later part of the month is cooler than the start.

I happened to glance at the outdoor temperatures one morning and was surprised to see it warmer at 6am than at 1 am.  Looking at the month as a whole I found that this situation arose on 8 (26%) days.  In the chart which follows I have plotted the difference 6am temperature less 1am temperature.

This could almost be termed an index of cloudiness since the days with high positive differences were also cloudy.

Looking at all my 179 observations there are 42 occasions (23%) when the 6am temperature was higher than the 1am temperature.  The period to date % and that for May 2013 are very close and there is no trend through the year.

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