andreas

I am beginning to get nostalgic memories of watching Ceefax forecasts in some of the winters in the 1980s when you could gradually count in an easterly, temperatures falling a degree or so day by day. Once it got to about -10 in Warsaw and -7 in Berlin one would get really excited - but still very early days for that sort of thing.

Following on from Jo Farrow, so it came to be: Jusqu’à 32°C atteints ce vendredi 28 octobre dans le Sud-Ouest WWW.LIBERATION.FR Cette fin d’octobre est marquée par de nouveaux records mensuels, y compris en altitude, et des écarts à la normale phénoménaux. Cet épisode de chaleur...

The tawny owls are out and about. But at 16 degrees currently, maybe a frost is a little wishful thinking.

What we would give for 50 mm or more of rain...

Indeed, in Crystal Palace we had no more than a few drops of rain yesterday, whereas seven miles to the north Westminster was experiencing flash flood.s. I suspect this will for a long time into the future be a limitation of models - which can attempt to predict frontal rainfall but the convective type is like trying to forecast bubbles in a saucepan of boiling water.

What really strikes me is that hot charts in FI now seem to verify most of the time, whereas in winter cold charts so rarely do. Maybe that sums up the complete nightmare.

Thanks - the next three frames at six hour intervals also showed moderate rain. But I see your point - the accumulated amounts is a much better map to use.

Maybe I have mis-read the latest GFS and just one run of course, but it looks to me that we have about twenty-four hours of moderate rain for the SE desert starting from the evening of Wednesday 17:

Down in the Southeast I am thinking of opening a 'Rain Haters' thread.

A few spots of rain have begun to fall.

Good morning, just back from a walk - very striking how much cooler the valleys are than the hills, minimum 19.9 here but noticeably warmer on the hill tops. The variety of 6.30 am (BST) temperatures would seem to illustrate the impact of these local effects.

Which weekend are we talking about? I thought UKMO only went out six days?

Crystal Palace National Sports Centre (Greater London) weather WWW.METOFFICE.GOV.UK Crystal Palace National Sports Centre 7 day weather forecast including weather warnings, temperature, rain, wind, visibility, humidity and UV ... and all of a sudden we are forecast 'heavy snow' at 14:00... well, we shall see.

It's just started to snow in Crystal Palace.

I don't recall seeing dewpoints as low as -40 in Scandinavia in recent years, particularly not in November. Is something afoot?

Fair points and I was being a bit tongue in cheek. But - with some caveats e.g. summer in the Sahara is sometimes below freezing - I do find dew points tend to give a better indication than temperature about how 'warm' the air feels (in the shade). Maybe that's just me.

At times the UK can seem like a septic tank or an appendix - depending on your choice of metaphor - for stagnant warm moist air...

Thank you for the update Josh Romano, I always appreciate hearing your weather news of Italy. Please accept my condolences on the death of your grandmother. I hope you and your family are as well as you can be at this time.

It is just me or is the forecast for the 6-15 August self-contradictory? The first sentence implies that the unsettled, changeable conditions continue to dominate throughout this period, whereas the penultimate sentence says it will be likely to turn settled through the remainder of this period (how ever 'remainder' is defined). Why does the Met Office not spend sum of its super-computing budget on employing a proof reader?

For those who know south London - reportedly (but I await photographic evidence...) golf-ball sized hailstones in South Norwood about an hour ago, barely a spot of rain in Crystal Palace 2 km away. At least not yet anyhow.

I think AGW may be referring to anthropogenic global warming.

I think fair enough - we are approaching mid-July; from mid-January there usually begin to be some hints of spring on its way, not least in the day length and solar elevation, so we are just doing the same for autumn. And it's only three weeks or so to go until we are in the 'autumn' three months for daylight, either side of the equinox. But in the meantime I shall be enjoying the remains of the summer as well.

A similar thought occurred to me HellitsHot. That we have got used to regarding around 40c as the possible limit for the UK in the most favourable conditions imaginable for heat. But the records this week were not just broken by a fraction of a degree, they were smashed by nearly 5c. In a UK context this would be 45c. That sounds unimaginable and perhaps - because of the proximity of the Atlantic - it is a false comparison for the moment, unless there were continued substantial warming over the coming decades.

Also quite unusual for a summer month for the temperature to be at its warmest in the early morning (16.2) before dropping to 14.7 in the course of the day, now 14.9.

For a moment I was thinking, blimey it must be a late spring in Edmonton, north London...