chrisbell-nottheweatherman

That would be my concern - if the two don't correlate there's the potential for serious confusion in the minds of viewers, which could lead to annoyance at the new arrangement. Would any such modification of the new provider's forecasts (or at least rejection of the implications of the data) cause friction between the provider and the BBC?

Thanks Dan. I must say, I consider the evening team (yourself, my namesake, Jim, Alex (when she returns from maternity leave), Julie (is she returning?) and Sara Thornton (about whom I was utterly wrong when she was with ITV) to be superb. I notice that Jim has made sure recently to do the evening forecasts in "normal" weather periods rather than is previous tendency to appear only when storms or other lively conditions were in the forecast!

Apparently, it's the USAF in Europe - still important, but not as eyebrow-raising as you suggest!

Thanks Dan; most informative. Other than yourself and the rest of the forecasters using data from Metra/Netherlands, will we see any significant changes to our regional forecasts?

I suspect the "halfwit" here is the commenter rather than the targets of his/her rant.

Interesting. For some reason I hadn't twigged that - though Michael's comments after he went on one of Paul S's storm-chasing trips should have told me.

Entertaining for those of us with the ability and knowledge (albeit rudimentary in my case) to find and understand high-quality forecasts and some model outputs, but unfair on the average punter who wouldn't know a shortwave trough from a blocking High.

Absolutely. So many of us in this country seem to embrace our peculiar UK approach to globalization which is to sell everything in sight to the first group of foreigners who turn up with cash.

Am I the only person around here to have come across that saying before?

Well, as I understand it, the Met Office's 2 and 3-day forecast accuracy is as good as anyone else's and better than most.

What happened to "If it ain't broke, don't fix it", I wonder?

Doubt it was a Vulcan if you couldn't hear it!

Typical - Norwich is just into the cloudy area, and I'm just to the south!

It's now clearing-up a bit here, as you suggested. Quite humid though.

My dad let our cat in around 4 a.m. and was convinced he heard thunder - I presume all the sferics were over the North Sea?

As a Norfolkman, I'm experiencing a moment of schadenfreude here; if you thought it was bad at this time of the year, try in the winter when there's a north-easterly from Siberia picking-up moisture from the North Sea! We call it a "lazy wind" as it seems to cut straight through you.

Don't know how I missed it - should have been visible from here.

I must admit I couldn't understand why I felt washed-out earlier, as it wasn't "hot" as such. It's only just occurred to me that it's the humidity....

Cheers.

Much the same here, Matt.

Do you mind if I set this as my desktop image? Are we still expecting another plume on Thursday?

Sounds like ours - just a massive bang.

You may well be correct; as far as I've been able to ascertain, identifying positive strikes by eye is pretty much impossible, and I had my eyes closed at the time! Given the "5 seconds per mile" rule, at less than 1 second it was bloody close! EDIT: Speed of sound = 372 yards/second. We reckon there was 1/2 second between flash and bang. That really was close!

Following my account of last night's storm (posted in SE&EA regional and Severe Weather threads), it's been suggested that what we experienced may have been a positive CG strike from the anvil of the cell which was just to our west. However, there seems to be some confusion as to what percentage of lightning strikes are positive. One member recalled a figure of around 1 per 1,000,000; however, most websites quote "up to 5%" or "around 5%". This paper: http://www.hindawi.com/journals/amete/2015/307424/ suggests around 10% of strikes globally are positive, but I wonder if this is higher than the UK percentage due to the influences of US supercells and tropical storms with very tall anvils and a great deal of moisture and heat increasing the rate. I'd be interested to hear any views or inputs on this matter.

According to this site, positive lighting makes up less than 5% of all strikes: http://www.aharfield.co.uk/lightning-protection-services/about-lightning