August 2026 in numbers: record coastal heat, then a storm that broke it

August 2026 had two halves. For four weeks it was a heat month on the coasts: Paralimni & Protaras averaged a daytime 33.9°C — 3.4°C above the 1961–1990 normal, and in the ERA5 model record no August since 1940 has been hotter. Polis Chrysochous matched the anomaly at +3.4°C (three hotter Augusts) and Paphos was +3.3°C (one hotter). Nicosia peaked at 40.0°C on 21 August.

Then, on the 29th, it all broke in a day.

Mean daytime temperature vs the 1961–1990 normal, August 2026 (ERA5 model).

Paralimni & Protaras: mean daytime temperature of every August since 1940 (ERA5 model); 2026 in amber.

The storm of 29 August

August is Cyprus's driest month, and this one ended with a storm that the weather stations recorded island-wide. The DoM network averaged about 20 mm that day (54 stations); 43 stations got 10 mm or more, 23 got 20 mm or more, and six got over 40 mm. Achna recorded 68.1 mm — its previous wettest August day was 9.2 mm. About 21 of the 36 stations with at least ten years of August records had their wettest August day on record, and at 27 stations that single day was more than 80% of the whole month's rain (many old August records are under a millimetre, so the bar was low).

The temperature fell as sharply as the rain rose. Nicosia's station dropped from 39.3°C on the 28th to 31.1°C on the 29th: 8.2°C in one day, the biggest one-day August drop since the station archive began in 2000 (previous 7.3°C, in 2002). The 29th and 30th (31.1°C and 30.9°C) were the two coolest August days in that archive.

And the wind: at 11:10, a storm outflow gave Mammari a 10-minute mean wind of 26.1 m/s (about 51 knots) — the strongest in that station's archive since 2021 (previous 23.9 m/s, November 2021) and far above any August daily maximum in the DoM automatic-station archive (previous 20.8 m/s). The typical station's top wind that day was 9.0 m/s against 5–6 m/s on other August days, and 11 of 33 stations with eight or more Augusts of data beat their own August wind record. These are 10-minute sustained winds, not gusts.

Nicosia, daily maximum in August (ERA5 model); the black ticks mark the 1961–1990 mean for each day, and the drop on the 29th is hard to miss.

Rain on 29 August at the six wettest DoM stations with at least nine Augusts of history (station measurements).

An earlier cloudburst on the mountain

Eleven days earlier, on 18 August, a downpour hit the Troodos massif: Agros recorded 49.9 mm, Polystypos 38.1, Platania 32.5 and the Troodos station 24.3 mm — while none of the 14 stations below 100 m elevation got more than 0.5 mm. The Troodos station collected at least 60.7 mm over the month.

Rain on 18 August at the wettest Troodos-massif stations (station measurements).

By place

Rain in this table is the ERA5 model's value for each town's grid cell, and a convective storm is exactly what a model smears. Paphos shows the gap: the model puts 23.9 mm on 29 August in its cell, but the Paphos town gauge recorded 0.0 mm for the whole month and Paphos Airport 0.4 mm, while the hills inland got 16–37 mm (Lysos 16.0, Amargeti 19.8, Tripylos 36.5) and Polis 8.0 mm. Use the station numbers above for what actually fell where.

Hot days, cooler nights

Limassol logged 18 tropical nights (never below 25°C), Polis Chrysochous 16, Larnaca 11, Paphos 10 and Paralimni & Protaras 9. Inland it was different: Nicosia's August nights averaged 21.8°C (29 days of data), about 1.5°C below the 2000–2025 average of 23.3°C, with day–night swings of about 16.3°C among the widest in the archive.

Method: temperatures and anomalies are model reanalysis (ERA5 via Open-Meteo, CC BY 4.0) averaged per place, baselines 1961–1990 unless stated; storm figures are DoM station measurements (23–24 August are incomplete in our station feed and excluded). Model values can differ from station measurements — see our criteria, records and the rain tracker.