August 2015 State of the Environment

Weather-wise August was a bit of yawn – both temperature and rainfall were boringly average.

In this case boring isn’t such a bad thing. After two months of lower than normal rainfall and temperatures see-sawing from positively balmy in June to frigid in July, it’s good to be back on an even keel. A lean towards more rainfall would have been helpful though. We head into an El Niño spring just a little below our usual levels for both river flows and soil moisture, but nothing too unusual.

Groundwater levels are giving eyebrows a bit more of a workout and they may be yet to fully respond to the past month’s rain. Definitely raising eyebrows is the stellar result we had over winter in terms of air quality – only one exceedance of the PM10 standard for all of winter and just at our Hastings site. Blimey, that’s good compared to previous years. El Niño can be a problem child in terms of its impact on our water resources but when it comes to air quality, it’s looking like the teacher’s pet.

Report at a glance. For the full rundown visit our website.

ENDS

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