East_England_Stormchaser91

Got these two beauties rumbling away! One to the S, one to the ENE!

I definitely observed and heard at least one of them yesterday. As the flash happened, it’s like it generated a huge impulse as it managed to get my living room TV to turn on without touching a button! About 5 seconds later, it felt like the windows were going to go through and the foundations of the house shook. You can tell straight away by the thunder whether it’s a +ve or a -ve discharge. The thunder is also much longer lasting than a typical negative discharge.

Your year was 2020. A warm Southeasterly most of the summer, storing the high dew points in the Cheshire gap and Manchester area. August that year up your way was insane. A rare setup.

Cell between here and Wisbech has some Arcus/shelf to it! Here’s to round two!!

Not a minute has gone by in the last couple of hours without the sound of booming thunder! This is nuts.

Just been watching this amazing cell dishing out almost constant thunder to my S! One strike made my TV turn on and then ground shaking thunder shortly after. Must’ve been a positive bolt!

Not a bad start to the season in these parts!

Just had the hailcore go right over! What a storm.

Constant thunder and I-C lightning here in Kings Lynn! Incredible stuff. Huge tropical drops of rain now falling.

Been busy with work on the best day we’ve had in quite a while around here. Some of the thunder was the loudest I’ve experienced for a long time! Storm after storm kept rolling by in numerous directions too. Almost looked like a typical day in Florida!! Here’s to more days like this throughout summer and the rest of spring.

Some cracking anvils today. What a day. Gutted I’m not able to chase!! Typical.

Amazing how far you can see it from when conditions are right! I’ve made out lightning over Crewe, Chester and the Wirral area from Cambridgeshire, and even as far as Somerset too. That’s pushing nearly 200 miles!

Wow, that must’ve been spectacular. Most of our amazing storms here are governed by the dynamics in the elevated layers. Correction from earlier post, it must’ve been April 2005 when those storms passed through! Just looked at the charts archive! Was a very good setup indeed.

I seem to remember late April 2004 I believe, I was awoken to some very good night storms heading NNE. I never had the fortune of being able to access radar back then, but they were very decent so early on in the season!! Still sticks in the memory. Followed by a lovely, warm day after too.

It just proves that you don’t necessarily need a summer like 2018 or 2006 to achieve record breaking extremes. The same could be said about winter. E.g the BFTE 2018 or 1987, which overall weren’t too cold, just extreme spells.

There’s a big difference being able to breach 40c here and 37c. You can get 36-37 under the 20c iso no problem under the right conditions. We had the 24-25c isotherm slap bang over us at 3pm on the 19th July 2022. I don’t think we have ever seen that before in the history of record keeping. Even with that, we only just managed 40c. That was no regular or normal occurrence.

In my humble opinion, I don’t see 40c being breached again for many years to come. Easily a 1 in 100 or more year event. Every piece of the puzzle literally fell in the right place at exactly the right time (mid July). A very deep plume out of Morocco, over a baking hot Spain and France with very dry soil, highest uppers combining with peak daytime heating, and no flash cloudcover. What was even more exceptional is how far North the temperature record was broken. Coningsby of all places! I can’t foresee another event on that level for many years to come.

Whilst I’m excited. I’m also a bit annoyed that this is happening into March. Even if it was a month earlier, we could have seen so much more effect from the deep cold. We can’t take away the fact now that solar input is many fold stronger than it would’ve been only a month ago, as we near to the peak acceleration rate of solar insolation per day. As good as the BFTE was, and 2013, even they felt somewhat ‘wasted’ compared to what they would’ve delivered in say late January. 1987 and 1991 were pretty much perfectly timed events.

I know the charts and foresight were minimal back then, but at only 5-7 days from the start of what was to be the most brutal period of weather in living memory, you would be scratching your head looking at these charts wondering where it could possibly come from and how it could happen!! Uppers of 0c and above across most of Europe, a fairly organised PV in a fairly undesirable area. Pretty zonal for the best part!

A very interesting battle going on, pretty much all predicated on what that bout of heights does from the Aleutian WAA, and how the residual greenland heights behave. If we can get that link up, that should change the outlook completely. Over the past, cold spells have often sprung up very quickly. 2012-2013 during January, it wasn’t until the mid timeframes that a scandi High suddenly built up. None of the models were interested one bit post 180 hours into each run until we got to more or less a week before the event unfolded! That was otherwise looking like a tedious mild winter.

Starting to get a feeling that some real fun and games could be the other side of Christmas. This isn’t no ordinary winter setup in our Hemisphere. Perhaps this is just a taster of what’s ahead. Most classic winters started off with a preliminary cold snap. Gav from Gavsweathervids highlighted this in one of his historical videos. The height rises from the Aleutian side could well start things off.

We need to get this week out of the way first, the I’ll be looking at any breakdown that’s meant to happen. None of the models predicted 4-5 days ago that parts of the SE would be having their best snow event since 2018 at the moment. So much can change in a short amount of time. We need to see if that surface high materialises and sinks into Europe, and how the attempted height rises from the south pan out.

Glad many are experiencing some decent snowfall. Hoping we have a few flakes out of it as it journeys North.

Areas in the NW saw significantly more snowfall than was first predicted throughout last night and today, so who knows. It’ll be a nowcasting event I would imagine! Some may get quite a dumping from this.

180+ hours is a long time in these situations. I’ll be ignoring any hint of a breakdown until we have agreement right across the board. In the meantime, it ain’t looking bad!