Sunshine and snow: Your photos capture Western Australia’s wild August weather

Western Australia’s winter ended with a little of everything: sunshine, snow, hail, fog, storms and sharp temperature swings. After a disappointingly dry July, August brought the rain that many parched areas had been waiting for.

Perth began the month with a maximum temperature of 17.7C, then climbed above 25C just three days later. Winter quickly returned. Less than a week afterward, the city reached only 12C, coming close to its coldest August day on record.

The rain did not arrive in the usual order. A trough and north-west cloud band stretching from the Indian Ocean first brought unseasonal falls to the western Pilbara and Gascoyne. Exmouth and the North West Cape typically receive only 5 to 10 millimetres in August, but overnight rain pushed Learmonth’s total to 12mm, above its monthly average.

The cloud band then carried tropical moisture south, joining a cold front that delivered widespread rain from the South West to the Goldfields. Cold air behind some of the fronts produced snow on Bluff Knoll, where hikers reported flurries on August 8 and again on August 11. Hail was also reported across the state, including in Esperance.

In the middle of the month, an unusual cloud band stretched from Exmouth on the west coast to Sydney on the east coast. It brought clusters of storms and rain across the state’s interior, although totals remained generally lower in the Wheatbelt and Great Southern. The weather was captured in photographs from vineyards, beaches, city skylines, fields and mountain trails across Western Australia.