Sainsbo

Heard a few rumbles today, and it's coming over very dark now. Wouldn't be surprised to see the heavens open in a minute after looking at the radar either.

Had a nice storm in Swindon at about 11:30 this morning. Frequent lightning and loud thunder, torrential rain, but it only lasted about 20 minutes. Probably the best one since last summer. Looks like we may catch the tail end of that very nasty looking squall coming up from the south in the next hour or so too.

Jack's looking well organised. Sea temperatures are warm, and shear is low. Central dense overcast is becoming more solid, and there isn't much that will impeed Jack from strangthening over the next 36+ hours.

I've had mine for a few months now, and it's been working well. It's easy to put together and get up and running, you just need to find somewhere high to put it that isn't sheltered if you are overly worried about your wind speed estimates. Most of the readings it shows correspond quite closely with the other weather stations in the town, bar the outdoor temperature, which always seems a degree or two too high during the day, but that would be my only complaint. I don't know how long they will last, but mine has been up for months and I haven't had to repair anything yet. It comes with a software so that you can see your history data on your laptop/computer. It's not the best software, but it does the job. If you display the data in a graph, it will show what the conditions were every 30 minutes on that actual moment, and I have yet to figure out if you can change that. It just means I'm unable to see daily high temperatures, unless it occured on the actal 30 minute mark, or I was lucky enough to catch it on the tablet. If you want something very reliable, then I wouldn't get this, but if you are happy with a reasonably small error margin, but something that isn't perfect, I'd say this isn't a bad buy.

I think it might just make it to a Category 5 on the SS scale. JTWC going for a peak of 135 knots, just shy of Category 5 (~155mph), but looking at the visual images over the past few hours it looks like Ita is becoming rapidly more organised. The eye is almost clear, and Central Dense Overcast has become much more solid.

Ita is slowly but surely becoming more organised, currently with maximum sustained winds of 90mph, gusting up to 115mph. With low shear and high sea surface temperatures, Ita should continue to intensify for the next couple of days, peaking as a fairly weak Category 4 on the Australian scale (Cat 3 on the SS Scale). Doesn't look overly menacing to look at currently but I'm sure it'll be being watched closely by people in North Eastern Queensland.

It seems like Ita may make a brief landfall north of Cairs, with winds of 100kts (around 115mph). Sea temperatures in the region are currently very warm, quite capable of supporting a cat 3 as being modelled by the JTWC. No eye as of yet but I'm sure we'll see one start to emerge today.

Air pollution is at 248 not too far north of London. The "healthy" level is 25. Crazy stuff.

Air quality is forecast to be 10 here on Wednesday, and 10 in London Monday-Wednesday. Does anyone know how common it is to see 10's? Does it happen multiple times per year or is it rarer than that?

Found an interactive map of the worldwide Air Quality Index (AQI). Might be interesting to see how we are comparing to places like China in the coming days. http://aqicn.org/map/world/ Levels may well get to 250 over the coming days.

It's amazing to see how fast things can change. JTWC going for a peak intentisy of 120kts (138mph) which would make it a solid category 4.

I'm gonna go with June 22nd.

Unnoficial of course, but my station is reading 20.5C right now, and I'm sure there are other locations further in the South East that have locally exceeded 20C.

Just hit 17C here, feeling very spring like.

Glad that there hasn't been too much rain down south in the past few days, it's given much needed drying-out time. Hopefully the storms will stay away for a while, too. I think this link may come in handy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_weather_records Note how about 50-60% of countries globally have recorded their hottest temperature on record since 2000. Just because we haven't been basking doesn't mean climate change is bs. It's called "Global warming". It's in the name. It's not all about us!

Posted a few pictures in the regional thread today, but they we're quite small, so I thought I'd post the better quality ones here. Went for a drive down to Hannington today, and here's what just about every field looked like. Couldn't even tell where the river was. Very scary.

Went out to Hannington today to see if there was any flooding, and what I saw was quite unreal. Fields as far as the eye can see were submerged with water, couldn't even tell where the river was. There were lots of flood signs up, and it looked like the waer at one point had risen further and inundated the roads. A few trees down too, but the flooding was definitely the serious problem out there. You see it on TV, but you don't realise how terrifying it is to see it up close. It makes you feel helpless.

Aha, nope, but it may as well be. Need to find a new location for it, I think.

My anemometer is reading a rather calm 12mph, and has been for about an hour. Might be something to do with all the trees behind it Meanwhile the other weather station in Swindon has recorded a gust of 53mph, the highest it's read since it went up about 4 years ago. Very wild outside. Stay safe everyone!

Winds seem stronger than forecast for the time here too. Gusting up to 45mph when the squall line came through. Some sneaky upgrades on the 12z, but the GFS still doesn't bring the winds as far north as the NMM. Strange to see such uncertainty when it's literally on our doorstep.

After what we've seen this week, with the last minute upgrades on Wednesdays storm (They were fairly significant, IMO), I don't think anything can be ruled out, especially when there still isn't good model agreement even at less than 24 hours regarding how far north the worst of the winds will be.

I completely agree with you on that one, signs were there even the night before of gusts of 80+mph quite widely over Wales, action could have been taken a little more swiftly. That being said though, the GFS and NMM did upgrade the windspeeds quite substantially, considering the timeframe, on Wednesday morning, so it may have been slightly underestimated by them also. They are the experts afterall though, so I guess they know best.

Hmm, it seems like there is still a lot of uncertainty regarding how far north the worst of the winds will get. Those images show the winds getting quite far inland, whereas the GFS and EURO4 are still showing them staying around the coast. Still a lot of uncertainty it seems, just like Wednesdays storm we may not know the actual track and intensity until it's right on our doorstep. Either way, it'll be an interesting one to watch!

Thomasz just posted this satellite picture on Twitter of the storm today. Beautiful but deadly! And here's what the WRF NMM had forecast just before it hit Southern Ireland this morning. Never seen the gusts off the chart before when it's not in FI.

I don't think anyone anticipated it to be quite this bad, the models did seem to upgrade it quite a bit at the last minute with little warning. The low currently is at 955mb, and probably won't deepen much more, if any, but I don't think this is a day we will be forgetting any time soon.