Winter weather 2018

This brings together the weather of July and August (which is my biological Winter) to examine the season as a whole.  Basically: cold and dry.

Rainfall

In the monthly posts I have made much of the drought currently affecting us.  Thus I got a surprise when charting the Winter rainfall, for which the series runs back to 1984.
The 2018 fall was the 4th lowest Winter with a low point of 15mm in 1994.  That comprised 4.2mm in July and 8,8mm in August (both lowest for the month). So, with the drought the issue is possibly not so much the low level of rain in a given month or season, but the extended period of low falls.

Temperature

The seasonal average maximum of 11.6oC was 0.7oC below the average since 2010.  It wasn't dramatically cold but well below the values of 2010-12.
 A little surprisingly, the average minimum temperature (-0.8oC) was also below the average since 2010 by almost 1oC.  This was similar for both months.
For mean temperatures, as measured by my waether station  I only have data available since 2014  This shows  an average mean temperature of 5.48oC which is 0.2oC above the average for this short period.  As this appears to go against what has been said for the extremes I have looked more closely at the data:
  1. Looking at individual months it appears this result is due to July 2014 and August 2015 being very cold months and thus depressing the average.  
  2. Calculating the average as (max+min)/2, which I know to be biased downwards but does give the whole period since 2010, suggests that Winter 2018 was lower than average mean temperature, with the period 2010-13 being significantly warmer.
I thus conclude that the results are in fact consistent if looked at for a similar time period.

Humidity

As might be expected a dry season as measured by the 1500 hrs Relative Humidity.

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