October 2016 Weather report

The Stony Creek Gazette weather report is largely as published, with the only change to the data available on the morning of 31/10 being a rise of 0.1^oC in average temperature.  So, not unexpectedly, the final day of the month was a tad warmer than the start of the month.

My initial comment was "In essence a rather bland month."  Then I discovered that it was a quite cold month for October as discussed below: I guess my original thought  was because it was so much nicer weather than the two previous months!

Rainfall

The 48.6mm of  rainfall was somewhat more than October 2015, but a tad below October average. 

We scored more than 0.2mm on 8 days, spread through the month.

The remarkable feature for the month is the way the topsoil has dried out.  There was little run off from the rain later in the month, in contrast to September where every drop just ran straight out.  While Whiskers Creek has run each day through the month even getting 15mm of rain in a day did not raise the flow above light levels.  Possibly this soil dryness was an effect of the relative high wind (see below)?

Temperature

When I first looked at the average maximum temperature for this month I feared there was a large problemo with my Weather Station as it was 3.7^oC below the average (since 1993) for the month.  Looking just at the last 4 years - ie records for my site alone - made the comparison worse with an even larger difference.  However I am able to access another Carwoola site through the wunderground network and found the other site was even colder that mine.  So I conclude that in terms of maximum October 2016 with an average maximum of 17.8^oC  was very cool.

This month I include some simpler graphs to emphasise the chilliness.  First up, the average maxima.

 Followed by the daily maxima for 2015 and 2016.

It is interesting that the hotter days in 2015 were in the early part of the month.  The last week was broadly similarly cool - probably proving the theory that tomatoes shouldn't be planted before the Day of Donkeys (ie first Tuesday in November).

Next is the minima.  The longer term chart clearly shows the extremely high value for 2015.

At a day by day level a comparison with 2015 shows that minima were warmer last year for most of the month.

Continuing the theme of cold, we recorded 9 minima below +2^oC, which counts as at least a ground frost (ie at ground level the temperature would be <0^oC).  Of these 3 were below <0^oC at the screen so count as an air frost.  The former was slightly below the long term average, while the latter was somewhat above it.  The next chart shows the relationship between 2016 frost days frost-days and the long term averages,

Clearly the wetter months had less frosts than the drier months with September being a standout!

Humidity

The chart of daily relative humidity readings for 3pm appears as the usual imitation of a badly sharpened saw.  It is notable that very few readings were below 40% which I regard as a "reasonable" value.  .  

 The average value over the month (55.5%) is clearly well above average.

Wind

October turns out to have been a very windy month.  Although my weather station doesn't do well at measuring wind (as the anemometer is mounted too low) its relativity should be OK.  The daily maximum gust show the usual variation as fronts came through

... while the monthly average of each hourly gusts shows it to have been the windiest month I have recorded.

As I noted above it is possible that this explains why the soil dried out so quickly.  It is very unfortunate that there are still no evaporation readings for Canberra.  I presume the Airport still can't find anyone to do the readings.