AderynCoch

After being stuck on the wrong side of that bloody high for the first half of June, summer has finally arrived in this part of Europe. Touching 30C today and up to 34C on Thursday. It probably won't happen but the ECM has me down for a ridiculous minimum of 26C on Friday!

I haven't forgotten it. Perfect conditions in Sheffield for viewing the transit of Venus.

Man alive, I just got caught in the heaviest rain I've seen for many a year, probably since the monsoonal downpours I experienced in Cairns, Australia over ten years ago. It had been a muggy but dry day until a thunderstorm broke out just before 3pm (it's still going). It was already bad when I had to go outside but then it intensified further and I got soaked to the bone. I had to put my phone deep inside my backpack; it still managed to get wet but fortunately I think it's okay (I'm posting on it now). Had I waited too long it would have surely been wrecked. I managed to film this before it became too risky: 20230608_154734.mp4 I'm currently trying to dry off in the centre of town. Still need to get home though!

Burlington, Vermont reached 35C five days ago; the forecast high for tomorrow is 14C.

A warm summery day gave way to a big thunderstorm when I was at work this afternoon, dropping the temperature 10C in one hour. Some very intense rain and hail (at least half an inch wide) for a time. There's been a fair amount of flash flooding in the region.

26C and sunny.

Schirm actually means "umbrella" in German, so not much of a typo really!

14C and overcast today. Absolute rubbish for May and yet the second best day in the past week largely due to the fact that it stayed dry. Yesterday was truly vile: heavy rain virtually all day with afternoon temperatures hovering around 9C. I scarcely believed it could get that cold here in the second half of May. Fortunately there's light at the end of the tunnel. It might get close to 20C tomorrow (still below-average) but then it should be mid-20s from Saturday into next week. Hopefully that's the last of the October-like days until... well... October. Just a tree or two floating down the swollen Danube:

Glory hallelujah, the sun is out! Temperature currently a tropical 16C. Unfortunately after two all-day washouts on Friday and Sunday there's another rain warning out for tomorrow into Wednesday. The Danube is already flowing at more than 50% the normal rate.

Friday: 12C and heavy rain. No sun Yesterday: 13C and some heavy rain. No sun Today: 12C and heavy rain. No sun Unfortunately it looks like this awful pattern isn't going to break until next Friday (though it should be a bit warmer tomorrow). After that mid-20s is finally showing but we'll see.

Bratislava: 11C with heavy rain (average high here for May is almost 22C). The weekend doesn't look much better. Simply revolting.

Thunderstorms approaching...

Very nice day today, 22C and sunny. I'm a bit worried about next week however as it's my birthday and the forecast currently looks grim (low teens and heavy rain). It had better change!

April is probably going to end up at least 2C below average here, with twice the average rainfall and about three-quarters the expected amount of sunshine. There's no 20C in the forecast out to at least 7th May (average high here at this time of year is 20-21C). I'm not that bothered by below-average temperatures in April but it's starting to grate now heading into May. It's all the more frustrating given how winter keeps on failing to deliver.

Just saw my first strikes of the year in the distance over Hungary. 20230423_215940.mp4 Looks like it's heading for Vienna.

It's definitely going to be a cold April here - the third on the bounce. Saying that, it was 22C and sunny yesterday. Today looks like a rinse a repeat but it's back down to 14C with rain tomorrow. At least the nice weather coincided with the weekend this time.

12C and dull today with heavy rain in the afternoon. Not very inspiring but much warmer than this day in 2017 when higher parts of Bratislava received 15-20cm of snow. The maximum at Koliba station in the city was a mere 1.8C:

All that rain here recently and upstream in Austria has caused the Danube to swell considerably (the discharge has virtually doubled). There's been quite a lot of driftwood being swept downstream, including some sizeable logs. 20230416_163449.mp4 Today has been better, 18C and sunny. Warmest day of the month so far. Temperatures dropping again tomorrow.

It was warmer than the following May, at least for the CET (10.3 vs 10.1).

If it makes anyone feel better, it's closing in on 40mm here in the last 24 hours and still going. That doesn't include most of yesterday's rain either. Temperatures stayed below 5C all afternoon. This could have been the mother of all snowstorms had it happened earlier in the season but of course these synoptics were nowhere to be seen in winter...

It's been raining here almost non-stop since yesterday morning and it's supposed to keep going throughout the day. Then there's more to come on Saturday. As I suspected, the first third of April here has been slightly colder than the first third of January.

March was bone dry here (only about 4mm) but April is going to more than make up for it. At least 30mm is predicted from late Thursday to early Saturday. Of course if this were snow it would have been downgraded to zilch by now. A notably below-average first half of April is on the cards too. It wouldn't surprise me if the first half of January this year turned out to be warmer.

Easter greetings from Orava in the north of Slovakia. Still snowy down to about 600m, though it's getting warmer:

From 20C to this in the space of a few days: 20230327_153245.mp4

Certainly the wintriest March I've experienced in the UK (I was away in 2013). I was also abroad during the final week so I missed the mild ending. 2005/6 was one of the colder winters around that time but it had been very frustrating personally as I didn't get much snow (there was also a severe cold spell on the continent in January that didn't make it to the UK), but March certainly helped to make up for it. The 12th was quite a significant battleground event in western parts of Britain, similar synoptically to 5th February 1996. I had to travel from Liverpool to Sheffield that morning. There was a fair dumping on Merseyside but once I got past the M6 there was virtually nothing. There was then full cover over the Pennines but only patches in Sheffield.