A.J

no storms, no thunder, no lightning, no MCS, and come to think of it, no money, no hope...the west midlands really sucks.....I'd write a letter of complaint to the met office if I could afford the stamp

Just to get 'no storms club' members in the west reaching for their prozac To sum up the model outputs & forecasts.....very promising for the east, very poor for the west....you just can't make this stuff up!

a few heavy downpours developing in the west midlands along the southern flank of the main rain band (we just had a 15 minute monsoon here!)...I would imagine the reasoning for this is the plume of high theta-w air pushing northwards into our region and destabilizing the rain band, intensifying ppn....A monstrous amount of rainfall is now appearing on the radar pushing across the english channel in association with this most plume which may well affect our region later today, whether or not this plume can aid in thunderstorm development in our region remains to be seen as saturated profiles and subsequent cloud cover might well be the issue

just got home from working in stow-on-the-wold (gloucs)....lots of elevated convection to the south, with a sky full of Ac Cas.....lovely, i'll bank that!

Hi Lewis....you're looking at the wrong CAPE charts to make that judgement mate...Any convection tonight is likely to be elevated in nature, and the MLCAPE (multi-layer or mixed layerl CAPE) and multi layer LI charts are very promising for a good swathe of central & southern UK....Not had chance to check the moisture profiles yet, so until I have a butchers at these, I can't comment on whether the profiles show saturation throughout the atmosphere (saturated profiles from my understanding would not be conducive to elevated storm development)

It's quite cloudy just down the road here....gimme my sun back dammit!

...that's a good one!

...tis working again now....yes, there is some moderate MLCAPE for southern & western districts during the over-night period , images from UKww/Skywarn GFS plotter ..hmm.....please edit if there are copyright issues (I'm not sure)...cheers

Good work Gavin, as always......but......we've not even had summer yet, so GO AWAY and stop depressing me! (...just joking...I just want some summer first! )

re MLCAPE values, I used to use the SKYWARN GFS chart plotter, but I can't get the damned plotter to work, keep on getting a bad script error

Coast....I'm guessing those are SbCAPE charts .....for what Andy is alluding to I'd be much more interested in MLCAPE values as we have a weather system encroaching from the WSW advecting up some moist unstable air from the south, I'd be looking at the potential for elevated convection.

something else worth thinking about is the vertical distance to the lightning strike as well as the horizontal distance, something that seems to be forgotten when calculating how far away a lightning strike is.....here's a scenario....Elevated storm kicking out forked lightning strikes 5 horizontal miles away....the lightning strikes themselves are discharging themselves from the anvil shield, say for arguments sake at an altitude of 10K meters (about 6 miles in altitude..Using simple mathematical formula, the lightning strikes are calculated to being 7.81 miles or approx 13 km away, which could explain why no thunder is heard...... CM....another thought, is it possible somehow that your orientation to the storm was such that what appeared to be cloud to ground strikes were in reality cloud to cloud...ie cloud to cloud bolts that move away from you towards the horizon giving the optical illusion of a CG strike?.......

as posted in the convective thread, there's some potentially thundery weather around for parts of our region whch may last until the early hours of tomorrow morning....lightning strikes have been to detected to the far east of the region as an area of showery heavy rain pushes slowly NNE wards across the region......NMM hi-res outputs has modelled this pretty accurately and progs locally torrential downpours for some parts

see above post...not unexpected...hi-res outputs have been progging potential for the midlands/east of England tonight for the past 18 hours

quite a few lightning strikes being detected east of Northampton, heading up into the east Midlands, also some showery heavy rain pushing up into the south & west Midlands....This shower/thundery activity was modelled by the NMM hi-res models for the past 2 or 3 runs, could be a very wet first part of the night in these areas

A lack of insolation for many parts mate.....far too much low & mid-level cloud around dampening and stopping convection from initiating....the best of the sunshine is over the SE quadrant of England

yep as predicted things are starting to happen in the west midlands..lol.......thunderstorm has fired to the north of worcester near stourport, and further north near Walsall so it seems.........May 9th all over again I hope!

plenty of time yet young Jedi....lol.......stuff brewing up over south wales in some clearer air look promising...as posted in the convective, hints of may 9th 2011?

the more organized ppn is moving out of your area soon..... ....I don't want to tempt fate, but the current radar (especially with that ppn massing over south Wales) and synoptic setup has striking similarities to May 9th last year, and for us in the West Midlands (especially here in Penkridge) this is a date which will stay long in our memories as it produced an well organized, absolute beast of a thunderstorm

things are certainly starting to fire near and along the south coast....The cell that came ashore near Brighton is now just to the east of Crawley and looks to be intensifying.....Nice looking sheared cell has fired just to the south of Eastleigh, Southampton...and cells are trying to fire to the SW of Chichester & to the west of Eastbourne

very interesting radar signature over your location at 1530....looks reminiscent of a hook echo, was their any signs of rotation in the clouds?

another area worth keeping an eye on for potential is that bowing arc of ppn currenty to the SW of Hereford...it's moving north eastwards and also moving into an area which looks to have much more favourable parameters for storm development

yes, lovely shape, and looks quite well organized with ppn fanning out ahead and strong core an indication of some decent shear...defo for areas to the NE of this, it's worth monitoring

I feel your pain Andy!...lol.....the latest batch that tip toed through the W Midlands in the past hour has, as expected, burst into a life and is starting to stomp a mudhole through the north east midlands into Lincs...This area is of interest IMO to anyone chasing in the Yorks/north lincs area as it's starting to spit out sferics on its northern flank and could well develop into a multicell cluster

same old, same old in the West Midlands...we breed them, the east gets them......getting to sound like an old broken record....lol.......line after line of showers fire up and as soon as they pass the west midlands they explode into life and start flashing & banging