Monday's top of 23.6 degrees so far has helped break a fortnight of mostly cool, gloomy and wet conditions. But such weather is likely to settle back in for about a week starting Tuesday, according to Rob Sharpe, a meteorologist with Weatherzone.

Last month was Sydney's cloudiest and wettest August in 16 years, the Bureau of Meteorology said, with about 90 minutes' less sunshine than usual for what's typically one of the sunniest months of the year.

The city also notched 10 days of at least 10 millimetres of rain in August - the most since 1908, according to Acacia Pepler, a climatologist at the bureau.

The brolly's work isn't done, though, with the arrival of a cold front on Tuesday likely to bring rain for morning commuters. More showers are forecast for each day this week before the arrival of another damp weekend.

"There's potential for another east coast low over the weekend," said Mr Sharpe.

A similar weather pattern contributed to the soggy last fortnight of winter, and turned what had been looking like a very dry season into roughly average rainfall for the June-August period.

Temperatures, though, should start to climb again by the middle of next week, with the city likely to dry out for a while, Mr Sharpe said.

Warm spell

For August, Sydney's Observatory Hill recorded temperatures slightly above average although most suburbs were cooler than usual, Mr Sharpe said.

For the winter as a whole, though, the coolish August was not enough to prevent the city recording its equal-fourth warmest winter on record with average maximums running about 2 degrees above normal.

June and July set the city up, with the warmest start to any winter in 155 years of records.

With record warmth in the previous month, the May-July period saw average maximums of 20.6 degrees, smashing the previous record set in 2005 by 0.8 degrees, Ms Pepler said.

The past 12 months are also comfortably the city's warmest on record, both by average maximum and mean temperatures.

The widespread rainfall in August will help ease immediate concerns about bushfire activity, with the forest fuel dryness index dropping back towards the lower end of the scale for regions of NSW east of the Great Divide.

Even so, parts of the north-east of NSW in particular remain on the dry side. "Over the last eight to nine months, they have received only about half their average rainfall," Ms Pepler said.

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