August was a little warm, a little cool, a little wet, and excellent all around!

August gave us a little bit of everything as far as summer weather goes. In the end it was a typical month with average daily highs spot on the 17 year normal for my station and over night lows a touch warmer than 'normal'. This was the first month all year to produce more than average rainfall but if we're honest, we need an above average month in the wet season not summer. But they way things have been thus far, I'll take the rain whenever we can get it.

August was not hot this time round. I had 3 days that popped up over the 90° mark to bring the total for the season thus far at just 6. That is about half a typical year, but September can bring some heat, particularly in the first two weeks. Another ninety or two is possible. August was pleasant, seriously pleasant. Every day except one made it above 70° and the one lone "cool" day was 69.6° so that's more or less seventy, right? The temperature never dropped below 50°, the chilliest morning was the 23rd with a 50.7°. Only 6 nights were under 55°. We had 10 overnight lows at or above 60° so this was an evening lovers dream month. The warmest overnight low came on the 2nd when it bottomed out at 64°. The coldest afternoon high of 69.6° arrived on the 21st along with some showery disturbances. The hottest day was the 28th when the merc topped out at 96.4° breaking a daily record at my location. It was one of two daily record highs for my locale the other was 95.5° the day before. August delivered 22 mostly sunny days and only 5 days with any precipitation at all.

Precipitation? But I wrote that we were above average, didn't I? Yes, yes we were in fact. I measured 1.58" in the pail and that is about a 1/2 inch over the established August "normal." Most of that rain fell during two heavy thunderstorms that rumbled through the area. The biggest one dropped 0.88 inch at my house on the 10th of the month, the other dropped 0.40 over night with 0.29 coming on the 29th and 0.11 in the wee hours of the 30th. There was a showery day on the 21st where I picked up 0.18 and the rest of the month was dry save for a sprinkle or two.

It was genuinely pleasant this past month. I do not like hot weather and we only had a couple of hot days. I prefer it to be dry in the summer, but we had a few short lived thunderstorms to wet the dry foliage, so that may help us in these last few weeks of fire season.

Hopefully we will have a nice wet fall to pad the weak rainfall numbers. We won't know until November and December but some nice soggy weather is long overdue round these parts.

Soak it up my friends, soak it up.