August 2014 Summary

An average August for both temperature and precipitation

Well here is something you might not believe, but it was actually a bit warmer than average during the month of August.  Not by much, just 0.3 degrees so it is still within the average range, but I’m sure a lot of people would have expected it to have been a lot colder than average.  Although it didn’t get all that warm during the month, it was also never really cold for very long.

One day that did feel cold was August 14^th when the high only went up to 15.9°C, the last time it didn’t hit at least 16 during the month of August was back in 2009.

The fact that we didn’t hit 30°C during July or August was something that got a lot of attention in the media.  However, not getting to 30 during these months is something we have seen 4 times in the 17 years of the UW weather station.  Thus it is not something we expect every year, but it is certainly is not all that rare an occurrence.

Although the 91.6 mm we saw in August was within the average range for the month, this really doesn’t tell the entire story.  Almost 2/3 of the precipitation for the month came down on the 2^nd when 59.4 mm of rain fell (this was the wettest single day since July 23rd, 2010 when we had 62.5 mm).  Of that total, 53.6 mm came in a single hour (3:34 to 4:33 pm), this is something that has only about a 4 percent chance of happening in any given year.

For the first 7 months of the year, the total precipitation of 596.0 mm is very close to the 586.3 mm that we would expect.

Summary for August 2014:

Maximum Temperature 29.9°C

Minimum Temperature 9.0°C

Average Daily High Temperature 24.4°C (Long term average 24.7°C)

Average Daily Low Temperature 13.5°C (Long term average 12.6°C)

Total Precipitation 91.6 mm (Long term average 87.0 mm)

(Long term averages based on 1971-2000 data for the Waterloo Wellington Airport)