Arctic Hare

Crawled up to 20.3 °C here in the end, so indeed cooler than yesterday. Not a bad day at all, though proper blue skies not much in evidence as there was a fair amount of high cloud almost throughout that made the sunshine hazy. Very hard to complain about this for October though! As for the time ahead... give me either this or a cool, fresh, clear northerly please. Not murk and drizzle and gloom.

A pleasant day with hazy sunshine and light winds here in N Worcs, but not as warm as I'd been expecting or had been forecast: 17.5 °C as things stand. Time for that to go up a bit in the next few hours, but I'm now doubtful yesterday (21.0 °C) will be matched.

Apart from the warmth (19.4 °C) a pretty typical early October day here. Minimal sunshine, long periods with completely overcast skies, a nagging breeze and even some drizzle a couple of hours ago. Usable, but nothing that will live long in the memory. I hope we get something a bit better than this over the weekend.

Steady, albeit fairly light rain and after a little gap there may well be plenty more to come from the west. Have to say the short-range precipitation forecasting for today has been a real bust. Even now, the MetO West Midlands text forecast implies a largely cloudy but dry morning.

This does seem to be the case. Maybe I'm maligning them since rain when dry is forecast is usually more noticeable than the other way around. But in terms of what matters to people in their everyday lives, improving short-range modelling of rain in particular should probably be a high priority. Not that I have the expertise to be able to do it myself!

We've had a very strange four months temperature-wise, with the CET for both June and September higher than that for either July or August. (When did that last happen?) As such, it depends a lot on what you count as "summer". July was a pretty dismal month for "high summer", considerably worse than the overall CET figure would suggest since mild, cloudy nights are far less important to most people compared with cool, overcast drizzly days. August started bad and improved later, but as danm mentioned earlier that means the school holiday period was plain poor for a lot of people. I don't like 2022-style extreme heat, but the persistent cloud and gloom and cool in July especially went too far the other way. It just didn't feel like the middle of summer at all.

Not the best day today. At least it's not as chilly as it was at times last week (18.1 °C right now) but it's overcast and dull to the point where if it gets any darker I'll have to put the lamp on. We did have a little bit of sun earlier, but there was also some light rain as well. Gusty wind, too. All very autumnal, really.

I was quite surprised when I saw that number! The sun really did make all the difference; it probably felt 3-4 degrees warmer than that. I was walking briskly, which also had an impact -- I wouldn't have wanted to sit on a park bench in that.

I think a lot of people's feelings about the next few weeks will be affected simply by the time of week. For example, the models look fairly keen on a midweek Irish Sea storm. Not very pleasant to be out in of course, but if the following weekend is at least okay I suspect most people will be less bothered (and will remember the period less negatively) than if roles were reversed with midweek decent and the weekend a washout. Still a fair bit of warmth in the sun at the moment. It's only 14.2 °C as I write, but with the sun out I was quite comfortable going for a walk in shirtsleeves just now.

Being able to see the sun at all was a bonus in summer 2012... In these parts I would expect the first sub-10 max to be in the first week of November. The Birmingham Christmas Market opens on 2nd November this year (seems to get earlier every time...) so I'll plump for that date as my guess for here.

Absolutely this, though for me temps are important, but (once we're out of potentially frosty/snowy months) daytime temps are vastly more relevant to me than night-time ones. A week of fresh, breezy, sunny days with maxes of 22 and mins of 8 has a lower overall CET than a week of humid, overcast murk with maxes of 17 and mins of 13, but I know which one I'd rather experience.

Weird Sunday... only 23 °C max but incredibly humid until mid-afternoon, too hot even to go for a moderate walk. Was a big relief when it became sunnier and a bit fresher later on. Monday looks reasonable, depending on what happens with any afternoon storms. Actually the whole week to come doesn't look *that* bad, even if the temperatures will be a bit more autumnal than of late!

On Sunday... until the sun came out in late afternoon, this was one of the most oppressive days I can remember. Not especially hot - maxed out at 23.0 °C, the lowest for about a week. But I went for a not very strenuous 20-minute walk around the local lanes at about midday, and I had to have a shower when I got back. It was significantly more unpleasant than Saturday despite that day being five degrees warmer. Much, much more pleasant in the later afternoon and early evening. Still warm enough to sit in the garden in shorts and T-shirt, but not miserably sticky.

A very different morning from recently... it's raining! Not hard, but enough for the road to be wet with a few light puddles. Feels fresher, though the possible storms later may change things a bit once again.

I think I'd call August underwhelming rather than outright terrible. My area *is* one of those in the blue area on the Aug mean max chart, and the lack of much actual warmth was tedious at times. On the other hand it was (certainly later on) a clear improvement from July, which at least in these parts had far, far too few properly usable, properly dry days. Depending on what happens later this month, I suspect I'll be happier with both June and September than either of the "height of summer" months this year. Autumn proper will hit us sooner or later as it always does, of course. Wouldn't say no to a 30 °C at the start of October before the storms come in, though. The current 29.9 °C record is slightly irritating!

Sneaked a peek at the model thread, and looks like there's a chance of some early autumn liveliness in about ten days if a tropical storm goes in the right/wrong direction to enable that. I'll be at an outdoor event (railway gala) all day on the weekend of 16/17 September. As such I would be *totally* unsurprised to see gales, 11 °C and lashing rain.

On the Sahara dust, I took this in Kidderminster at about quarter past nine this morning. There were other cars with even more.

I actually think the UK climate gets a little too much hate overall. The one thing we really do poorly on is sunshine. Otherwise, unless you're in one of the very wet places in the NW it's fine for the most part. I'm kind of happy that it's not 45 °C every summer like southern Spain or -40 °C every winter like northern Canada, that we don't get hurricanes or (big) tornadoes, etc etc. As for right now, I quite like heat in the daytime but much less so overnight. That's one reason I prefer my heat earlier in the year, since you tend to get reasonably cool nights still. I was in Scotland in the hot part of this June and it was perfect in that regard.

Lots of Sahara dust out there this morning. Cars absolutely caked with it, enough that drivers are having to wipe the windscreen before they can safely move. I hope nobody spent hours washing their car last night!

Really pretty murky this morning. I was in Brum and couldn't see the top of the BT Tower from the platform at Snow Hill. Chilly with it, until the sun started to break through. Very warm thereafter though the sun stayed quite hazy all day. Clear blue skies would have been nice, but oh well.

Having the summer and autumn threads running in parallel and talking about the same event is getting rather confusing...! Anyway, a slightly odd day today. Surprisingly chilly early on, with considerable murk and haze. I was in Birmingham and you couldn't see beyond halfway up the tallest skyscrapers. Once the sun came out in late morning things warmed up rapidly, though the forecast 29 °C was a fair way off - topped out at 26.4 °C here, I guess partly down to the slow start. Air pollution starting to be a factor now. The Defra UK Air forecast for Saturday has levels into the "High" category across a swathe of northern England and "Very High" for a few areas of Lincolnshire. Pollution forecast - Defra, UK UK-AIR.DEFRA.GOV.UK

Morning everyone. Pretty dismal morning here in Bewdley, looks like we've just had a line of mostly lightish rain over us for about 2 hours now. Puddles everywhere, grass utterly soaked. Completely dry 15 miles away in Worcester! One of those things, but it's really annoying when the forecast was so much drier...

This is what gets me as well. I understand that weather is extremely complex and that sometimes a small change upstream can have big effects downstream. But if you're still predicting that there won't be any significant rain coming when there is already significant rain falling and heading your way then you have a problem. A slightly flippant suggestion, but maybe all TV forecasts should be made outdoors rather than in closed-in studios! ETA: Also the decline of local media has really not helped, since local knowledge can improve forecasts. An example from my neck of the woods: cloud "burning off" in spring/early summer quite frequently takes several hours longer in the Severn Valley than is forecast for "the Midlands" as a whole. Everyone around here knows that, but forecasters in London don't seem to.

I would definitely take that, the September in particular! I've been taking advantage of the £2 bus fare cap at the moment (I don't drive, for health reasons not by choice) and September is often a good month to be out and about as the weather can still be great but the kids have gone back to school so it's less busy. September 2006 was a glorious month for doing stuff outdoors, for example. Even early October can be quite useable outdoors, if you're lucky. I probably do more stuff outdoors in October than in April most years.

You can see it both ways, I guess. If you're in a "glass half full" mindset, then you think of the fact that this is in the worst few Julys in the last century, which means that the large majority of them aren't this bad. It's only a year or so since we were all talking about 40 °C. If you're in a "glass half empty" mindset, then you think about how NW Europe in general (including the UK) is among the cloudiest inhabited regions in the world and so this greyness happens more than in most countries. So if this foreigner is from Spain or California, the difference would be very noticeable even in a good UK summer. Mind you, they're in London. Imagine if they'd spent their time in Lancashire recently...!