Summer tyre

You had sun? You lucky, lucky...

Well, knock me dahn wiv a fevver. Just been two strikes off Dunkirk!

I'm reading the visible radar as showing thick cloud back into France. The rain is certainly steady. 20240506_121044.mp4 Perhaps I should change my handle to rain tyre

14.8mm of rain so far. Raining hard. Thick cloud out to the channel that isn't going anywhere today. There is nothing to give any surface heating.

Ah, thank you - found them now.

I'm doing some homework on CAPE. Does Netweather carry any Skew-T charts?

Hi @Supacell; I was based near Eastbourne for the entire duration of the storm, and like you I have around an hour and a half of video. I have also been disappointed with the appearance on camera and agree that there was a lot more activity than now appears on my screen. I think this is a technical issue to do with the camera sensors. You have to make a choice with a camera; it's either set to pick up the tiniest amount of light, when the image looks grainy and odd when edited such as the image here. This does actually show an illuminated cloud behind the trees which simply appeared as a dull flicker on the night to me watching but I had forgotten to turn a light off in the depths of the house and it's clearly shining into the garden - but completely invisible to me until I saw this image and turned it off. However, if there is a proper CG or even a cloud strike nearby then I would just have a completely white rectangle as the sensor would be overwhelmed. People want to capture those wonderful images of CG and so set cameras completely differently to to let much less light in. Once you do that, it becomes insensitive to these faint strokes that the eye still registers and so you get a distorted idea of the totality of the event. I was using two cameras and a smartphone in my attempts to bridge this gap.

The weather here has felt distinctly hung over after its late night last night. We have had mist and grey unbroken cloud all day with slack winds which have strengthened a bit this afternoon and evening to westerlies which have turned the mist into mizzle which has made it feel cold and dank yet again and now has turned into proper drizzle. Yuck.

A cell has ignited just north of Cologne, almost exactly where the storm started that ran along the Thames estuary yesterday, and is starting to move in the same direction as yesterday's.

@Flash bang flash bang etc (GREAT handle) there was a LOT of activity. I had a great view from the house (we are one street back from the sea) and the number of flashes for the two hours was stunning. I posted a brief clip (83 seconds) earlier, and I tried to count the flashes. I think it is 63. That's 1.3 a second and for the 75 minutes I was recording that was pretty much sustained. That's 5928 - not far off your estimate, but that's just my area - you suggested the storm lasted 3 hours so that is over 14,000. I did notice that I saw more flashes than seemed to be being recorded officially; Jo Farrow says that there were 8100 or so. @wimblettben - your activity has drifted over to Ireland.

@wimblettbenThere's a cell building just off Aberaeron which may be responsible?

Hi @Tom Montalbano Thank you for your interesting and heartfelt posting. I think your counsellor may well be quite right. I have a list-making approach to these free floating anxieties, and it starts with asking what the worst thing is that could happen? Once you have understood what that may be, you develop a coping strategy for it. I do recognise that you have had some awful times, but many people have told me that they find it a valuable approach to phobias and anxieties.

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.