SteveElbows

So anyways my point with mentioning the met flash warnings for my area appearing recently was meant to be that I took it as a sign that at least some of the heaviest rain has a higher chance of hitting me than previous model runs & earlier radar realities may have indicated.

Cheers for the detail Ian, Im not a huge critic of the met at all, I pay a fair amount of attention to their stuff and I know they have quite the burden of responsibility. Generally I think they do a good job, their tabular forecasts can be a tad misleading sometimes and they seem to err on the side of not mentioning thunder unless the chance is really high, but having tried to learn something about weather in the last 9 months Ive decided its a tricky job that often seems to be thankless, especially when people measure the forecasts against what happens in their own precise location as opposed to the general picture.

So, any other decent webcams anywhere in the target area for tonights rain, preferably ones that have a reasonable framerate rather than just updated every x minutes?

Yes but most regions went orange long before us, we stayed yellow till pretty recently.

Met office have done flash warnings for Herefordshire,Worcestershire and Warwickshire within the last hour (previously just advisories for these areas).

Yeah to my untrained eyes it does appear that the main action could end up a little bit further north than has been suggested previously, based the the radar right now, but its probably still a bit early to judge?

I think maybe you got that impression because a lot of the heavy precipitation was off the edge of the radar area at the time. Now we are starting to see more of it thats further to the east and north of the first bit that showed up on the radar. Looks juicy.

Caught a train from Nuneaton to Birmingham on Saturday morning, the service was just starting to recover from disruption which was apparently caused by lightning striking signalling equipment somewhere in the Coleshill Parkway area, during Fridays storms. This would fit as quite a few big blobs passed just to my east and north that afternoon, and the thunder was very loud for a time even though it was not directly over my location.

Loud thunder heard moments ago in Nuneaton although I think the main activity may be just to our north.

Well its just starting to hit Nuneaton now, Im at work but think I shall take my lunch break early so I can observe.

Yeah that may well happen, although looking at the radar Im not placing any bets just yet, theres a chance it could just hit us if it changes shape a bit.

Yeah theres quite a lot of activity showing up there on the various online lightning detector maps. Have fun!

Well the BBC is usually almost identical to the met, and for some reason they dont seem to want to mention storms very much, and are frequently rather late with warnings about this stuff. Completely agree that the table-based met forecasts arent exactly the best guide to the unfolding reality, they are slow to change them and Im not sure what their methodology for these forecasts is but its often less accurate than their own 'invent' maps.

Oh joy, the fairly unreliable met tabular forecasts have got the thunder graphic for Saturday night for me.

Morning all. To answer Andys question from the previous thread, no I didnt hear any thunder last night, although the rain here was quite impressive for a time. Was quite gusty too, a tall bush in our garden seems to have been uprooted. Nice to see a fair amount of electrical activity showing up already, though I better not get my hopes up too much.

More and more activity showing up but no humans to verify whats happening at the moment it seems.

A little bit of electrical activity now being detected somewhere in the uk at the moment according to one or two tracking sites. I dont trust the accuracy of these things too much in terms of location, but looks like its just to the south of ireland and/or between wales and the south west. Any ideas?

Ive been getting reasonable results in recent months by basing my expectations on the GFS maps 'UK storm risk', combined with the storm risks shown by other sites and the insightful comments posted on these forums.Combined with some chance lucky timing for when I choose to be optimistic and when I decide not to expect much, Ive not had too many days where Ive felt let down. Seeing many days with lots of potential on the GFS models and then have to potential vanish in later runs can be quite a let down, but its nice when potential vanishes and then returns. This week for example I should probably have been more optimistic than I turned out being, which is just as well as today and yesterday I have just been missing out on some decent rainfall, keep clipping the very edge of cells or missing entirely. Today I have seen many interesting clouds but only had a few seconds of large but infrequent raindrops. Right now I can see a rainbow, over some menacing clouds heading to my East. I will be sad if this season ends without one thunderstorm at night and I dont think Ive had any hail yet either, but Im keeping a mix of anticipation for somthing special and a gloomy sense that it wont happen at all in my mind. One day it will happen, even if its not this year, and then it will seem even more special for all the waiting.

Oops that made it sound liek there was more thunder here than there really is, meant lots of rain and a little bit of very loud thunder here and there.

Well I didnt have to worry about missing a direct hit. Lots of rain and thunder here now.

Impatiently waiting to see if one of the main bands hits me or not, presently so near and yet so far.

I see estofex have a warning for water/landspouts for most of england today. Meanwhile the showers have mostly missed me so far, hoping one is about to hit within the next hour.

Despite the poor year for storms so far I have certainly seen the explosive building to our immediate west that you describe on the radar a fair few times this year. I know that compared to many places in the world our temperatures do not get that high, but personally I think there is usually at least one time each summer that the heat & humidy get a bit much, and the air quality gets kinda bad. Ive been here since 1975 except for a few years in the 1990s, and in terms of extreme memorable weather events there havent been too many really. The occasional drought, decent snowfall, thunderstorm that raged for most of the night, high winds that arent very catastrophic, these are things that I experienced a few times, with the decent snow & droughts more a feature of my childhood than the last few decades. We had a small tornado in my town almost 3 years ago but it didnt cause much damage at all, the Birmingham one gets more attention as real property damage occurred, albeit in a fairly small area. The only weather events that had impact on my life have been a couple of times where it snowed quite a lot and stayed around for a week or so, which was enough to cause disruption. Coupled with power-lines coming down due to winds or the wrong kind of snow, this lead to a feeling of being prisoner to weather conditions and if they hadnt got the power back on in time we would have started running out of tap water. The event is amplified in my mind by being fairly young at the time, I guess it was probably only 2-4 days serious disruption and it was roughly 20 years ago. One thing you may notice with the UKs response to weather is that because our extreme weather is pretty rare and relatively tame, we dont put in place a lot of resources to cope on the rare occasions that temperatures, snow etc differ from the norm. So things grind to a halt quite easily, and the media like to talk of doom and stuff running out, so we certainly make the biggest meal we can out of the weather we are served with, no matter how small the portion.

Those ominous clouds of which you speak made it go rather dark here and we got some reasonable rain for a few minutes.

Really heavy rain here from just before 5pm, no thunder that I could hear but the rain was very loud. Still raining now but with less intensity. Well, that was intense, heaviest rain Ive seen here this year I think, by an easy margin. Managed to video it as it approached and then tried out the slow-motion low-res recording function on this camera, will find out how it has turned out once I calm down a bit.