the state of our environment | August 2014

Apart from temperatures being pretty bleak through August, we otherwise fared from pretty good to fabulous. Although August felt awfully grim there were a number of positives - we were pretty much dead-eye dick on normal August rainfall, spookily 100% normal on the Heretaunga Plains, which means we head into the spring and summer months on healthy soil moisture levels, groundwater levels around normal and rivers heading towards their usual levels. Temperatures were ugly, particularly our daytime highs, which went steadily downhill after starting the month in the early twenties and that was despite sea level pressure being anomalously high in our neck of the woods during the month. The problem was that the highest pressures tended to be centred over southeast Australia (image below) and we copped a load of very bracing southerlies coming around the eastern flank of the anticyclones. Shunting my grizzling about the cold aside, the star for the month and the winter as a whole has to be our air quality. For the second month running we kept within the PM10 standard and that’s a phenomenal result. Well done to all who have taken to clean heating and a reluctant thumbs up to the southerlies, which probably drove any sane person to light a fire but simultaneously blew any muck away.

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