Not nights for dancing

An average night temperature of 24°C made August nights the warmest ever since the Meteorological Office started keeping records at the airport in 1948.

The mean minimum temperature for August is normally 22.1°C.

However the Met. Office pointed out that records kept at what was then known as the Valletta meteorological office show that the August nights of 1945 and 1946 were even warmer, at 24.6°C and 24.2°C respectively.

The average maximum temperature last month was 33.4°C, a little below that of 1999, which had the highest temperatures with an average of 34.6°C.

The highest temperature last month was 38.3°C, measured on August 19 - this was 5.5 degrees lower than the warmest temperature ever recorded, that of 43.8°C on August 9, 1999.

The lowest temperature was of 21 degrees reported on August 2 - the coolest temperature ever recorded on an August day was 15.9°C, on August 27, 1972.

The average sea temperature, at an average of 28.1°C, was also quite high compared to the average for the past 30 years.

This may be due to the absence of strong winds in the western and central parts of the Mediterranean associated with an extensive anticyclone that affected most of Europe and the Mediterranean.

The sea warms up mainly due to the direct absorption of sunlight - but if the sea is not stirred up by strong winds, the warmed upper layers do not quite mix with the cooler lower layers, the Met. Office explained. The average wind speed last month was 4.8 knots (5.5 mph or 8.9 km per hour). An interesting feature last month was that 91 per cent of the time the wind was either calm or very light.

The only rain day was August 1, which produced a total of 0.6 mm. August has an average of 7 mm of rainfall.