cheese

I think it's just the lightning illuminating the clouds - certainly nothing nearby as far as I can tell. Still, went outside - a balmy 23C with constant lightning to my north. Doesn't happen that often here,

Don't worry Saint - there's actually no storm in Leeds, but a brilliant light display further west. It will skirt by to the north.

Ain't that the truth. Our time will come eventually though. I'm looking at tomorrow evening.

Get some film - or pics!

It's nowhere near here either but it's incredibly bright nonetheless. A decent consolation prize for an otherwise very poor evening.

Yeah, saw some good lightning from those cells near Manchester. We might not get anything but I suppose this is a nice second best - especially on a warm night. My eyes are turning to tomorrow.

Oh, and another supercell heading towards Newcastle - 3 years after the last one? Seriously - it has some of the coolest summers in England, one of the least thundery on average, and wasn't even that hot today - never got above 30C - yet they can get these amazing storms while the rest of us get sweet FA. Grrrrrr.

But the thing is, living in the US, somewhere like Florida or Nebraska, you are almost guaranteed to get a storm at some point. Even if you miss out in one event, you're likely to get one another time. IIn the UK, that isn't the case. We missed out today - most people did - and I bet I won't see a single storm for the remainder of the summer. Okay, that's just me being annoyed, but still - it's happened before.

I could see that storm in N Yorkshire from here! Huge cumulonimbus. It's annoying when places 3C cooler on average in summer can get better storms than you despite it being much hotter here. Ugh.

Okay - but Heathrow doesn't have much of an urban heat island to begin with - it's on the edge of London. Northolt isn't central either - it's north London. Why would Heathrow be hotter than Kew Gardens or London City Airport despite the latter two being considerably more urban in nature? Ditto the old London Weather Centre which was often a couple of degrees down on Heathrow's values when it was open.

Indeed. He's the same in winter - always downplaying snow potential only for 10 inches to end up falling.. lol.

You haven't been proven right - because it's only 5pm and most models agree that storms wouldn't begin breaking out until later? Seems silly to make such a call now. Maybe a few hours and nothing has happened.

Well, no blanket cloud here - currently sunny albeit hazy. Give it time.

Let's keep our fingers crossed HC. After the heat today, I think we deserve a nice storm.

Frosty is in Wakefield so not far from Leeds. We had thunder already but no direct storm - hoping tonight delivers but we'll see.

Highly doubt it - the UHI has a minimal impact on daytime temperatures - and similar temperatures were reached in Norfolk. London is just located in the hottest area of the country usually. Either way, it's roasting up here too.

Sporadic thunder rumbles now, and it's only cooled down to 29C. Very humid.

Heavy rain here with large drops. Reached 32C earlier.

I have no idea why everyone in Manchester and Cheshire is getting so depressed over tomorrow evening. Looks pretty good to me. Might as well wait and see what happens.

I don't think you can really gauge the temperature for a specific day from looking at precipitation charts.. GFS and ECM have certainly shunted things eastward but would still expect 26C here - but it can easily swing back. Yesterday GFS showed 28C - indeed, with thunderstorms early on.

That's odd - I live in Leeds too and we have definitely gotten more than a couple of storms over the past two years (which isn't saying much at all, is it?).

Yeah, in Leeds it's still sunny but there's random areas of mid-high level cloud moving over from time to time. Dunno if it's a result of atmosphere instability, but it's actually kind of annoying because there's no chance of anything happening here until tomorrow afternoon.

They have, yeah. August has been rather lackluster in recent years - August 2013 was warm but not very sunny - about average or slightly below. Usable, but more sun would definitely be nice. 2015 to buck the trend perhaps? 2014 was a total horror show!

During ideal scenarios, perhaps, but August consistently recorded the highest temperatures until recent years. June just isn't warm enough - especially when ocean water is significantly cooler, reducing the potency of hot plumes. Seasonal lag and all that. June is a great month when weather permits, but it's not as reliable as July or August for consistent warmth, hence why I rank it last out of the three summer months - the weather in July and August is simply more likely to be conductive to being outdoors and just enjoying life. That one day in June 2012 when it never exceeded 10C and had about 20mm of rain - nothing like that has occurred in July or August here.

I would much rather have a warm August than June. Having a good start to summer followed by a quick degeneration is very disappointing. I'd rather summer start of poor like this year, before slowly improving - leaves a better taste in the mouth. Actually, the first half of June is more like spring than summer - still prone to cool weather in the low teens, or even sub-10C, like in 2012 when we had a max of 9.8C and pouring rain all day - terrible. It's like winter 2010/2011 when we had that amazing December, but Jan and Feb were pants - people were kind of disappointed because the entire winter climaxed early and we had two months of very mundane weather to endure, with not a hint of cold. Or like summer 1993 which was good in June but the rest of summer was dire. Even summer 2006 was a little disappointing because that August was crap.