August Monthly Report

The typical weather for this August has broadly followed the same trends as most other months so far this year, particularly on temperature where once again it's been a little cooler than normal.  Rainfall in August has actually been significantly less than expected, though more days than average have seen some rain.

The reasons behind both these headlines are one and the same: mainly Atlantic weather producing more than our share of frontal systems and spells of unsettled weather.  Yet we haven't been troubled too much by low pressure, as the chart below shows.  Nor have we battled with strong winds (an average wind speed of just 3.9mph is nothing untoward).  No - the story of August 2015 is more that we just haven't had a sustained spell of high pressure to bring the warm sunny weather we want to see.

Back to temperature: the mean temperature for August was 15.3°C, slightly below the typical August average for Blackburn of 16°C (Weatherbase.com).  Our mean maximum figure was actually almost a degree higher than expected, but the mean minimum was nearly two degrees cooler.  The lowest temperature for the month was a chilly 6.4°C on the 12th - not what we want to see in August.

Rainfall for the month was 46.2mm, lower than our expected figure of around 65mm (msn.com).  But this year we've had rain on more days than we'd expect - 21 days have seen rain against an expected figure of 18, and this ties back to the weather patterns we've been seeing - frequent spells of wet (not especially wet, but wet nevertheless) weather coming in off the Atlantic.

As we move into September, we're already seeing dryer conditions take hold, and it will be interesting if a more settled pattern of weather will stick around for long as we head into meteorological Autumn.