Summer tyre

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!

Hit our highest temperature for months - 16.3 deg C. Don't all cheer at once.

Yes indeed, @Jo Farrow; cheered me right up! I drove across much of the south east today in low cloud and mizzle, so here's hoping.

Thanks @Jo Farrow for a nice upbeat look at a cheerier weekend!

That insignificant looking little low that followed Kathleen packed quite a punch. Look what happened to this beachside coffee shop in Falmouth from high tides! It's been unexpectedly windy overnight here too; I expect all the beachstones that had just been pushed off the promenade by the bulldozers will be back again. https://www.instagram.com/reel/C5g5vpOL-0Q/

Cornwall has taken a pasting tonight

I think Storm Kathleen seems to have tracked about 100 miles further east that it was predicted, so the band of rain on that trailing flank that should have gone through the middle of the country caught the south east. Again. It was gusty here, too. The good news is that today is sunny and dry.

Horrible here - cold, dank and windy.

I'm in western France at the moment, and the clouds here have been incredible over the last few days. Here's a storm heading in over Arcachon bay, with huge, pendulous ridges of cloud that looked to me almost like ridged mammatus clouds. Any expert comments?

We have come just south of Bordeaux, France in the hope of some better weather for Easter. I have just watched the ECMWF predictions and the whole of Western Europe looks dire! This huge depression comes in across us all and then stalls over the UK essentially as a vast unwanted Easter egg of rain. So it's not going to be any drier where we are - the one good bit is that when the sun DOES shine it's a bit more powerful.

SSW started Monday, which isn't going to help Spring get going!

Alexis, I guess you are talking about mopheads, not lacecaps. I'm not sure where Mum's is, but I think hydrangeas should be fine down here. They're incredibly resilient and difficult to kill. I trimmed ours in the front a couple of weeks ago. Officially you wait until late Spring, and that tends to mean early May down here. If you do cut them and there is risk of a late frost cover them with some horticultural fleece and they'll not get damaged.

Agreed! Next door's garden is a pond again for about the third time in 6 weeks. Can't do anything in the garden. I actually managed to mow it on Friday, and planned its annual fertiliser for Monday, 4 days later. No, mizzle all day. Today - proper washout with flooding under our local bridge again. It was dry when we went out, and an hour and a half later it was 15cm deep.

Here's a challenge for you. I will be going to Europe later this month for Easter, and while my original plan was to go to the tulip fields, looking at the long rangers for the Netherlands looks suspiciously like our current weather whenit gets to Easter, with the jet stream trapped to the south and damp drizzly weather on the cards. Do you agree? Should I head further south into southern France with a higher chance of sun?