Britain's 100 Degree Summer was how some in the media reported summer 2003.

The fact - it reached that milestone very briefly on one Sunday afternoon, on 10th August, at one very select area of Kent and not again anywhere in the country or at any other time. I myself recorded 36.5c that day.

They used to have a good weekly segment late on Monday nights on 5 Live with Philip Eden and the way the media used to "re-translate" weather info to create their own narrative was a pet hate of his that he often mentioned exasperated him. The Daily Express have taken it to new extremes though.

Agree with you that 27c (Sunday's peak UK temp) in the month of May is nothing too remarkable. Frequent May's will find some location at some point in the month with that figure.

cloudy, dull, muggy and wet....

well that should suit the 'its too hot' brigade... how after 2 days it can be too hot is baffling, especially in the sirocco we had.

It may have been so much cooler today, my peak was just 16c, and cloudy and drizzly all day long but the atmosphere was far more humid and uncomfortable than on the hot days over the weekend.

Same old story - a line of what look like severe thunderstorms over Northern France, and as usual, not a single lightning strike this side of the English Channel.

lightning radar

You must be a bit like me and enjoy a really good thunderstorm.

One of the best I can remember in my location I caught on my brand new camcorder I had at the time, on the night of 8th & 9th August 1992. It seems from pure memory that we had more heavy thunderstorms in the 80's. I always used to have a rule of thumb up until a few years ago that I could almost guarantee a thunderstorm in the last week of May or the first week of June. Apparently May 1967 was the most thundery month of the 20th century.

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/media/pdf/6/b/May1967.pdf


This article about the wet and "remarkably thundery month of June 1982" is very interesting;

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/1.../wea.1891/full

It's interesting that the above article seems to confirm my own thought's that severe thundery summers seem to have diminished in recent years compared to the 1980's.

hmmm..... another hot spell later next week?

this mornings models are suggesting high pressure drifting across the southern uk later next week and building to our east... could be more heat IF this evolves

Yes, these days you can go through entire UK Summers without a single thunderstorm in many areas. This seems to date from about 2008 onwards. Odd really.

I too remember a thunderstorm from August 1992 - a middle of the night one - where quite a bit of the lightning was green.

Thanks for the interesting links, especially the 1982 one

thunderstorms aint what they used to be....

well, from my perspective not they arent.

growing up in the 60's early 70's between derby and nottingham, our village was perched on the north side of the broad trent valley. so we had a great southern aspect.
storms always seemed to come in a line, on a southeasterly flow. they seemed to hit the southwest first, we watched the sky darken, we could hear thunder. . after being envious of them over that way it soon became clear that the squall was on at an angle to the general airflow. we got our storm. it would darken considerably, we saw the updraft into the cloud, we saw the squall line and the large grey mass following it which was where the thunder, lightning and heavy rain were.

the storm had serious lightning, loud violent thunder, torrential rain and hail.

it would pass over and it would become sunny afterwards, the east of us would have it last.

thats how i remember storms from that era, 31/8/1972 was one, as was 15/9/1973. i made records of these and other thundery activity.

but over the last 40 years, these style of storms are all but absent, with only a weak one a few years ago fitting that description.

all we get nowdays are just grey murky masses with fart thunder, apologetic lightning, and after the 'storm' (im loathed to call these thundery rain showers 'storms', ) we have 4 days of grey overcast skies.

i know 'my' storms of the past exist as described, because ive had them in spain recently.

i used to love those storms, real storms, no messing, unambiguous, energetic, violent 'man' storms. i miss them.

i remember a storm in 67, it struck a footballer in sutton coldfield .

i remember the early june 82 events, i was on holiday with mates wit week, we missed most of the storms, but i got back on the saturday, it was stinking hot, humid, milky skies that quickly went thundery as torrential rain with thunder and lightning swept across us.

The storm I most remember was 24th June 1994, with literally continuous lightning. The sky was ablaze with numerous streaks of forked lightning of varying hues, set against a background of incessant sheet lightning. Thunder never stopped. Several places struck locally, and a number of "thunderbolts" - the bang simultaneous with the very close lightning This went on for 2 hours before it gradually died out. Started about 7pm and was the more spectacular as it gradually got dark. Had been preceded by a torrential shower, with no thunder, about an hour before. We wondered if that was going to be it........

5th September 1958 described below. I'd love to have been witness to that one:-

Blimey O’Riley!

“India just set a new national record heat benchmark when the small city of Phalodi, in northwest India, recorded a high temperature of a whopping 51 degrees Celsius, or 123.8 degrees Fahrenheit, on May 19. “


P.S. The official Worlds highest ever recorded temperature is 56.7 C (134 F), which was measured on 10 July 1913 at Greenland Ranch, Death Valley, California, USA.

models are still toying with a heatwave... the synoptic charts are nearly coming together for one, but stubbornly refuse to finish the job and put all the pieces in place..... grrr...

possible heatwave later next week - and in time for the bank holiday...

Is this the heatwave you are referring to?

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news...ch-30c-7990546

Looks like most 5 day forecasts for London are predicting cloudy weather, a little rain and around 18 degrees. Hopefully for once the press reports predicting a heatwave will be right but its not looking that hopeful!

A heatwave (or a coldwave) is *always* possible 8 days in the future! But in reality, they don't often come to pass. The models look to me like normal weather for late May, with a few days up around 20-22C if we are lucky but not necessarily dry. As always, a handful of localities may exceed those values but such are usually untypical (and are grabbed immediately by the media).

The tabloids are bonkers, interested only in clickbaiting.

Met Office are going with drier, sunnier and warmer weather from early June.

It beat the previous record of (I think) 50.6C set back in 1956.

Seriously hot.

Thunderstorms in the extreme South East - classic "Kent clippers".

Dear me, that's some serious heat

Talking heat, and in one of my old Guinness Book Of Records from the 80's there is an interesting heat endurance record which states that the highest temperature that naked men were able to endure during military tests back in 1960 was 200 Celsius! It doesn't say for how long though.

Talking tabloid clickbait weather related nonsense and one of the worst I came across by accident a couple of days ago was from the Daily Mirror which mentioned that this could end up being the hottest May in 170 years! It then quoted that discredited source Exacta Weather. Pure utter tripe from top to bottom. For a start it stated that the average temperature for this month was something like 13.1c and that the hottest ever May, which it quoted from 1833 had an average of 15.5c or so, and deduced that we were only a couple of Celsius behind that and could catch it up. Oh dear oh dear! Any fool knows that a difference of a couple of degrees in average monthly temperatures is absolutely massive. It was such a fundamentally ignorant piece. Weather related journalism in the main national rags is getting progressively worse by the month.

As for 21st May 2016 at my location, it was more akin to late October, with leaden skies all day, a temperature in the mid teens and some very heavy rain at times amounting to 11mm. Although for the month so far it has been drier than normal, with just 24mm three weeks into it.

Not long, I think... though some people do routinely endure saunas well in excess of 100C for several minutes.

The key to survival is the body's ability to lose heat through sweating, and such feats are only possible if the surrounding air is extremely dry (and also explains why you need to be naked). It is possible to survive for quite long periods at temperatures where the water you need to drink in order to continue to be able to sweat has to be cooled - not to help in cooling your body, but simply because if stored at the ambient temperature it would scald you!

At present, there is nowhere on Earth where the combination of high temperature and humidity makes human survival (unaided by air-conditioning) impossible (rather than merely difficult), but it has been argued that global warming will change this.

Advanced long range newspaper forecasts are usually a total waste of time anyway.

But a lot of people don’t enjoy weather that brings temperatures potentially as high as 35 degrees C or even in excess in some places. Mid 20’s degrees C is much more bearable for most.

70 or 80 degrees C e.g. will always be far too hot for man to cope with to live in for more than a few minutes.

Massive hailstones coming down here in the Nth East (around Sunderland/Washington) , and thundering like buggery, what a racket, well bloody loud

EDIT: Bugger, its took me Freesat out

Here is an absolutely fascinating article about "Heat Bursts".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_burst

Below are two of the most extreme cases ever recorded, the Portuguese one is in my old Guinness Record Book, which is what made me check it out further and find the above info;

6th July 1949 in Portugal the air temperature apparently rose from 38c to 70c (158f) in just 2 minutes.

June 1967 in Iran and a heat burst apparently sent the air temperature rocketing to a quite absurd 87c (189f).

Extreme... and unconfirmed. It is very unlikely and probably impossible for any thermometer then in use to register a 32 deg C air temperature rise in the timescale reported, due to thermal lag. So I very much doubt that frankly ridiculous claim. Similarly the Iran report, also unconfirmed and with not even a timescale reported. I just don't believe either claim as reported unless e.g. hot sand blew into the instrument screen covering the thermometer (which wouldn't be a true air temperature).

But I don't doubt that heat bursts can and do occur, albeit within much smaller and more sensible temperature ranges. The daft extreme cases mentioned would, however, make for an interesting global warming film of the Day After Tomorrow kind!

Incidentally, during the Great storm of October 1987, temperatures shot up by around 10 degrees C for an hour or two overnight in many parts of southern England (at over 6 deg C an hour), which exceeds many of the cases of heat burst reported in Wikipedia!