Azazel

Tonight is I believe the first night I’ve gone into the garden where it’s nice and calm and I can faintly smell plant growth. Wonderful.

Yep, very grey and cool here but when the sun does make a fleeting appearance it does feel pleasant - first time i've got in my car the other day and it felt pretty warm inside

Driving home from getting a takeaway at the weekend, there was the slightest hint of light out west still at 7.30pm

Dire here currently and a dire outlook in the charts. Looks revolting. Roll on May.

haha thanks guys! Quite mild today, but looks trending cooler and more unsettled - really hope high pressure re-establishes itself by mid-month. Wouldn't be surprised if we don't see any warmth again until April however - In recent years, we almost seem to flip from winter straight into summer in April. 2018 - The glorious summer started in April - I remember going to someone's birthday party and we had some elevated storms in the evening (the only storms I saw all summer). 2019 - We had the freakishly mild spell in February but I recall being away in Cardiff for the Easter weekend and it got very warm. 2020 - I have a picture of me having a BBQ in the heat on April 4th last year - so I'm guessing it also switched around the start of April.

Could we get a Spring moans/chat thread so I can openly moan about Spring?

Bye winter. I will take an unsettled westerly at this point over a dreadful easterly like the rubbish we had a couple weeks back.

I have hayfever and let me tell you my nose is never blocked, but runs like a tap.

Yeah its been pretty grey and blah here - not noticed the warmth at all - hopefully some sun this weekend will lift spirits.

Cloudy, breezy and some rain here so it doesn’t actually really feel all that warm.

Lmao ok - I will completely change my weather preferences because you don’t agree with them Hi my name is Azazel and I like cool weather now because Daniel* said so. Jesus Christ.

This is my point though - for YOU it is plenty warm enough. I personally prefer it a little warmer. For YOU it quickly becomes exhausting etc. I don’t go down to the south of France on holiday for moderately warm temperatures of 20 degrees. My expectations for a U.K. summer are very very low - I understand perfectly what climate we have thank you very much.

Is there fundamentally anything wrong with saying ‘I personally find 20 degrees at the height of summer disappointing?’ it’s similar to a fan of cold weather saying ‘I find 8 degrees at the height of winter disappointing.’ Do you see what I’m saying?

Absolutely unreal to see storms moving up from the channel into the south west. For me to get a violent (non elevated) storm in my location, I need the storms to come from as far to the south west as they can with the longest land track possible. The storms that day may have been an elevated MCS for most of the time but the bit I caught in Whitchurch was definitely 100 percent surface based - maybe it rooted itself beneath the boundary layer for a time.

I absolutely find 18 degrees in summer cool and 20 degrees I would describe as disappointing.

To be fair this is much more appealing than that awful Christmas song

It must’ve been yes because I wasn’t at school!

I do lad - you won't find me sniping at people who enjoy the cold in the winter - but you will find plenty who revel in the misery of others when its cool/rainy in the summer. Nice try though.

I sort of remember these storms well. I had set up in a field facing south with my mate for the evening. Camping chairs, radio, beers and whiskey. One of my friends went home at about 10pm calling it a bust - but we kept the faith. Around 11 I think it was, I was having a wee when I saw a flash out the corner of my eye. I returned to my friend and we silently strained our eyes into the night. I distinctly remember the sky being pretty clear and the moon was big and beautiful, poking its face in between illuminated pockets of Accas(The real stuff, not Grimsley Accas). After a few moments, there was a distant flash - and then another. I checked Netweather on my phone and we had lift-off over Bournemouth. As the storm moved north, it skirted to our west - the lightning was epic and strobing, but mainly high-based. You could see the anvil lighting up and there were definitely visible striations - suggesting a supercell (I've seen pretty conclusive pictures of the same storm from a member on UKWW). I remember turning to my friend and saying "I think this might be a supercell mate". Unfortunately, I was by this point too wasted to operate my camera properly so didn't manage any in-focus photographs - it's probably a good thing I was so drunk because we were pretty exposed in our location - normally I would've headed for shelter but I just slumped in my chair watching the show. It was awesome, but probably outdone by the July 2019 storms which had the most intense, ferocious, war of the worlds style lightning I've ever seen in my life.

The only time I've seen daytime darkness was from an amazing storm in the south in late May 1999 - it might have been the very last day of May in-fact. I was climbing a tree at the time and spotted this beautifully text-book defined anvil to the south-west, so I climbed down and let the boys know it was probably going to thunder in a bit. Being absolute mad-lads at 14, we went and stole some beers from my friend's dad's fridge and sat in his garden which overlooked the village and skies to the south-west. As the storm approached and moved in-front of the sun, it took on an incredibly dark appearance with a low, well-defined, raggedy, scuddy base and the visible sky beneath went a brilliant orange. Wanting a closer look, we walked the 300 yards or so down into the village centre. This is when it ramped up a notch. It was only I believe 2-3pm, but the street lights came on. I could not believe how dark it was this close to the summer solstice in the middle of the afternoon - without exaggerating, it felt like twilight. There was an eerie silence and heaviness in the air and people in the village centre began scattering for shelter. The wind was warm and instead of typically blowing away from the storm, it was blowing into the storm and the clouds began to take on a really ominous, sea-green colour contrasted with bright grey/white bits of scud which swirled in different directions. As I watched, the clouds began to rotate and "suck up" in the middle. I couldn't believe what I was seeing - it looked like some weird CGI effect and totally alien to anything I've ever seen before. I think people i've spoken to about this storm have checked the charts and it was an MCS - but perhaps this daughter cell took on brief supercellular characteristics? Because I am convinced I was looking directly into a meso. As it moved over the top of us, the heavens opened with some absolutely incredible tropical rainfall, moderate hail and vivid blue/pink lightning. I have never seen anything like it since and I doubt I will ever see anything like it ever again. I went to Florida the next day so that was a great summer for storms for me! EDIT: Didn't the Newcastle storm of 2012 feature some gnarly daytime darkness?

Lol - you just described exactly how you ‘cold fans’ are all winter long. ’wahhh it’s not cold enough, wahhh mArGinAL, wahhh those 850s are too high, wahhh the cold spell is still 240 hours away but I’m going to look for charts 90000 hours away to complain about a potential breakdown of the cold which hasn’t even happened yet’ And let’s be honest, this site has a strange, ingrained bias towards cold weather and always has - so much so you get ‘cold fans’ coming into the summer threads during summer to just snipe and troll. It’s one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever seen. I would be quite happy with 20+ degrees all year long apart from maybe a week around Christmas to make it feel seasonal. Some of us simply do not like the cold. It’s time to understand that.

The weather is absolutely foul right now but I still don’t want a boring easterly back - not until like July anyway.

For sure. We have a new-build with our bedroom being in the "loft space" - it is absolutely unbearable in the summer during a heatwave and absolutely frigid in the winter also - most comfortable sleeping conditions are in spring and autumn lol. Having said that I still love me some summer heat.

Oh just checked the model thread - the warm settled spell is off. Such a grotty little climate.

Rain pretty much every day for the rest of time according to my weather app - I thought high pressure was meant to be paying a visit?