We are sitting in an established El Niño. The textbook says a winter like that in our part of the world runs dry, clear and cold, with frost on the flats and a gauge full of cobwebs. Dayboro got the opposite. More rain fell here in June then in the previous four Junes combined, the days ran warm, and the coldest morning of the whole month was 4.9°C. That's not a typo. The month that was supposed to be beige turned out to be one of the more interesting ones I've written up this year.

What actually happened, in numbers

The station recorded 95.9 mm of rain across 15 rain days. The mean daytime top was 23.1°C, the mean overnight low 9.6°C, and the overall mean for the month came in at 15.5°C against a station June average of 14.7°C. Four days made it to 25°C or better, with the warmest being 27.1°C on 3 June. In June. The coldest morning was 4.9°C on the 2nd, and only one other morning (5.0°C on the 4th) got within cooee of it.

For anyone new here, a normal Dayboro June morning has you scraping the windscreen at least once or twice. My records show most Junes deliver at least one morning near or below 2°C. This year the air jsut never got the chance to properly drain and chill, and I will get to the reason for that further down.

How it compares with every other June on the record

The first thing the chart tells you is that Dayboro does not do average Junes. The station median is 33 mm, but hardly any June actually lands near it. You either get a drenching (239 mm in 2008, 248 mm in 2009, 211 mm in 2012, 279 mm in 2016) or you get next to nothing (2.3 mm in 2022, 11.4 mm in 2023, 12.2 mm in 2024). The 2008 one still amazes me every time I look at the raw records: 196.3 mm of it fell on a single day, 2 June 2008, with the tipping bucket going more or less nonstop for 16 hours straight.

Against that field, June 2026 sits in a strange middle seat. At 95.9 mm it's nearly three times the median, the wettest June since 2016, and wetter then the four Junes of 2022 to 2025 stacked on top of each other (68.1 mm between them). But it's also less than half of what the proper soakers delivered. Middle of the pack sounds boring until you remember the last time we saw a June like this, most of the current crop of weather station followers were not reading this site yet.

*2016 covers 26 of 30 days, so I left its temperature averages out rather than publish a skewed number. The station has no June data at all for 2007, 2013 and 2017 to 2021, and I would rather show you the gaps than paper over them.

Look at 2023 in that table for a second. Seventeen rain days and only 11.4 mm to show for it. That is a month of drizzle that never got its act together. June 2026 had fewer wet days and brought home eight times the water. Rain days and rainfall are two different stories, and this table is the cleanest example of that I have.

The temperature side: warm days, soft nights

June 2026 was the second warmest June for daytime tops on the station record, behind only 2023 (23.6°C). The overnight story is the one I find more telling. An average low of 9.6°C doesn't sound dramatic, but the recent Junes have been running 7.8 to 8.5°C, and last year gave us nine mornings at 5°C or below. This year gave us two. If your winter veggies noticed the difference, that's why. My capsicums that normally sulk from the first cold snap were still pretending it was autumn well into the month.

Day by day: three wet pulses and a warm spell

The month broke into clear chapters. The first week was dry and behaved like a normal June, cool starts (4.9°C on the 2nd) and sunny 22 to 27°C days, and it produced the warmest day of the month on the 3rd. Then the pattern flipped. From the 8th to the 14th the station collected 60.5 mm. The gauge, it tipped 37.3 mm on the 10th alone, biggest fall of month and more rain in one day than fell in the entire June of 2022, 2023 and 2024 put together.

Watch what the overnight lows do in that stretch on the chart above. The mornings of the 9th, 10th and 11th ran 12.9, 13.8 and 13.7°C. Those are October numbers, not June numbers. Cloud is a doona. The rain band sat over us for days, so the heat that would normally radiate off to space overnight stayed put, and that one wet week is most of the reason the monthly minimum average landed 0.7°C above normal.

Mid month dried out and gave us the 19th and 20th at 26.4 and 26.0°C, a proper little warm spell. The 22nd dropped another 19.9 mm, and then brutally the tap shut off again for four days before a soggy, drizzly finish added 14.1 mm across the last five days. Three wet pulses, two dry gaps. Not one long soak.

So why did an El Niño June turn out wet and warm?

This is the part I've been chewing on, because the headline driver says it shouldn't have happened this way. The BOM has El Niño established, with the central Pacific running well above the threshold through late June, and the Indian Ocean Dipole sitting neutral. My first instinct was to put the warm days down to the El Niño and leave it there. Actually, thinking abotu it more, that only explains half the month, and it is the less interesting half.

The half it explains is the temperature. El Niño winters lean warm for daytime tops in our region, with more ridging and more sunshine between systems, and that fits the 23.1°C average and the two bursts of 25°C plus days nicely.

The half it does not explain is 95.9 mm of rain. For that you have to look at the water just off our coast, and this is my read of it rather than official BOM commentary, so weigh it accordingly. The sea surface around Australia has been running average to well above average, and off the NSW coast it peaked at abotu 3 to 4°C above normal in late June, which is a remarkable number for winter. Warm sea puts more moisture in the onshore flow. So each time a system did cross us in June, it was drawing on a fatter moisture supply than a normal winter airstream would carry, and an air mass that came off that warm water simply cannot produce a 0°C Dayboro morning. Summarized in one line: the El Niño set the warm, ridgy backdrop, and the warm Coral and Tasman water loaded the rain gun for the three systems that got through.

One caution before anyone extrapolates. A single month is weather, not climate, and El Niño's grip on coastal Southeast Queensland winter rain has always been looser than its grip on our spring. I am not claiming the drivers failed. I am claiming the local details (that warm offshore water especially) mattered more than the Pacific label this month. The BOM is also flagging a possible positive IOD for later in winter and spring, and if that arrives it stacks the deck back toward dry. Enjoy the full tanks.

What it means on the ground

• Tanks and dams. 95.9 mm in June is a gift. The last time winter storage got a top up like this was a decade ago.
• Pasture and gardens. Warm soil, no frost and near 100 mm of rain means the kikuyu never really stopped. Winter crops that usually stall in June kept moving. So did the weeds, sorry.
• Frost watch is not over. July and August can still bite, and a drier spell under El Niño ridging is exactly the setup for a late frost. Two mild months does not retire the risk.
• Fire season prep. A wet June grows fuel. If the positive IOD shows up and dries us out from spring, all this green growth cures into exactly what we do not want standing around the place come October. Slash it while it is soft.

I will do the same exercise for July once the month closes out. If the mornings stay this soft I might even get a capsicum through the whole winter, which would be a first for me on this hill.

Henk

Method note: all Dayboro numbers above come straight from my station archive (2008 to 2026, with gaps in 2007, 2013 and 2017 to 2021 where no local data exists). Rain days count every day with 0.2 mm or more. Climate driver status is from the BOM's ENSO and IOD updates as at late June 2026. Where a claim is my interpretation rather than a measurement, I have said so in the text.