Summer tyre

I feel quite sorry for brontophobes; I love storm watching and have never felt scared at all. It's an exhilarating experience.

Wow. Do we have a total strike count yet please, @Jo Farrow? I have just counted 63 visible flashes in the 93 second video I posted last night!

Well, that was mega. @Daniel* - down here on the south coast we had over an hour of strikes (mostly C2C, I didn't see a single ground stroke but I have yet to review all the video) and it was at least a strike a second, and often 90 a minute. That's a phenomenal amount of energy and one of the most impressive storms I have witnessed in the UK. Only beaten by storms in places like Florida and the Mediterranean area in my experience, but even then the duration was extremely unusual.

Eastbourne is getting some hits now, and will get some serious rain; it's then likely to sweep along the coast over Seaford and weaken still further. The strike rate has now dropped by half, so it mightn't be much by the time it gets to Chichester and then on to Winchester. What a wonderful display! I think it's done here, so I'll sign off.

I have over an hour of video to review; difficult to know if there were actually any ground strokes near us; it looked mostly veiled by cloud.

Large, lazy drops of rain just started. Intensity of lightning reducing a little, although individual strikes closer.

Here's what it's like on the coast. It's still dry. May storm.mp4

Approaching lightning out to sea now very frequent; around 1 stroke a second. This is tropical storm intensity.

@LetItSnow!That appeared from nowhere, gathered over the coast and was torrential all within 30 minutes!

Lots of people on this thread right now

Here's some homework for the morning, @Thunders Understanding Metering and Metering Modes PHOTOGRAPHYLIFE.COM Basically evaluative is what your camera or phone will default to.

There is some proper rain heading for Eastbourne and Seaford - it's coming across from the southeast. Team Bexhill will just get the edge of it.

Ev (evaluative) normally refers to the type of metering on SLR type cameras.

Fresh cell opening up just off the Baie de la Somme

Just spotted a flash

@Supacell I'd head south rather than to Folkestone; the sweet spot has been described as Brighton to Eastbourne. Right now where I am it is still and clear and there are even a few stars visible!

What are you seeing that on, @Eagle Eye? www.lightningmaps.org?

We got rain.

I have that Bresser 5 in 1 and it's fine. It had been showing me the low battery icon since about Christmas, but the ground has been too saturated to get a ladder to it. I changed the batteries last week and solved that, but I have noticed that the anemometer doesn't spin quite as freely as it did when new. Can it be serviced, oiled with silicone oil in some way? Any advice welcomed.

21.2mm here overnight.

@alexisj9 you were lucky; we had rain all morning! Light, infuriating stuff that dealyed me sorting a problem with a car as I needed it to be dry.

Temperature log for the last 30 days here. Max 16.3. Min 3.2. Steady downward trend for the past 9 days, which is bizarre in April.

According to my weather station we had 2.4mm of rain at 10 am today. Actually I serviced it and changed the batteries so the rain bucket got shaken around a bit!

One of the major hazards of lightning strikes are ground potential shifts; a lightning strike a few tens of metres away can cause a very large ground potential gradient, to the extent that the ground under your right foot can be hundreds of volts higher than that under your left. Apparently, that is a far larger cause of lightning-induced deaths and serious injuries than actually being struck directly. If you are caught outside in lightning, above all don't lie down - make sure you keep your legs together to minimises the distance between any points in contact with the ground. Entire fields of cows lying down have been killed by lightning strikes for this reason. Equally, this means that nearby electrical equipment can suddenly find a large voltage difference across it and the effect is that the lightning appears to have jumped invisibly to damage it. It hasn't, of course.

Big cell developing just south of us - a cloud went over and dropped some big spots of rain and a bit of hail, got offshore and erupted!