Hello August! Happy faces all around today as the sun has finally come out to play again. While our day lengths have been getting steadily longer, it’s been too overcast for us to register, with only 7.8 hours of sunshine for July. That’s right! 7.8 hours for the whole month!
Overcast skies also meant that, sadly, there was absolutely no chance of us seeing the blood moon or lunar eclipse last Friday, so no great Antarctic photos of that phenomenon to share with you.
As Antarctic Mawson winters go, lack of sunshine aside, July has been a bit warmer and windier than average, although ‘warmer’ is always a relative term down here.
- We equaled the July record of highest minimum temperature of −5.8⁰C on the 27th; first recorded 6/7/2007.
- We had an average daily wind run of 1209.0kms, which was 230.5kms above the long term average of 978.5kms.
- We had average daily sunshine hours of 0.3 which was 0.3 hours below the long term average of 0.6 hours.
- We had 4 blizz days, taking the yearly total to 15.
That ‘blizz’ stat feels low as we've had many more days of snow blowing about making it hard to see and uncomfortable to move about outside, however not enough to fit the ‘blizz’ conditions standards. Certainly blizz tails around station are getting longer and Nate has the digger out today trying to re-establish our access as the blizz tail next to the Red Shed has once again filled in the main roadway.
All this winter weather has meant that weekend jollies have been cancelled and life has been pretty quiet about the old town. As ever, work continues though…
Thanks to Linc for the weather stats.
