August is normally the second-hottest month of the year, with an average temperature of 78.1 degrees, compared with 79.8 in July. For rain, it is the least rainy of summer months and the one and only averaging less than three inches (2.93).

Here are some of the factors that informed our outlook and that we’re monitoring:

El Niño has faded to neutral, but lingering influences continue. El Niño is one of the main reasons we’ve seen warm, humid and rainy weather, although it has faded in recent weeks. Even so, we’re still hanging on to borderline El Niño conditions, so it should continue to have an influence on our overall conditions.

West Pacific typhoon activity is waking up. Typhoon activity in the western Pacific can disturb the jet stream pattern, sometimes profoundly. In the summer of 2017, Super Typhoon Nuri pushed the jet stream northward in the north Pacific, which caused it to dive down in the eastern United States, causing our pattern to flip from hot in July to cool in August.

Models are forecasting a flurry of new storms over the next week in the western Pacific, and they could influence our weather pattern by mid-August. It’s unclear whether they’ll cause the pattern to flip, as in 2017, and the month is likely to start on the toasty side — but they bear watching.

CFS model predicts near-normal temperatures and below-average precipitation. The National Weather Service CFS model has been jumping around a lot with its forecast. Usually when it predicts near-normal temperatures for the East Coast in summer, it ends up being hotter than normal in reality.

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For precipitation, it’s forecasting below-normal amounts, but with rains coming in the first week of the month and the lingering El Niño influences, we still lean toward a wet pattern prevailing again.

CFS temperature forecast

CFS precipitation forecast

Our August forecast in historical context