Tim B

There, I think that was a rumble. Not 100% sure as the TV is on but it sounded like a distant one and the sky is very dark to my south east now.

I wouldn't be surprised to hear a rumble of thunder or two in the next hour, it is very warm and humid here now and it is getting increasingly dark with big thermals going up. I've been watching the birds riding them around in circles up and down. Look at this too:

I suppose it depends where you are, up where I am the simple explanation is that every summer starting with 2007 to the present day has been terrible with none of the prolonged heatwaves that are required for proper storms. 2006 was the last year when I saw decent thunderstorms here and there was a good few of them, but that year was scorching hot from May to October with only a few cool periods. Everyone flocks to the convective discussion threads whenever we get these mini heatwaves but the stone cold truth is they simply aren't good enough for proper thunderstorms as there isn't time for sufficient energy to build up except in rare situations where a plume is involved, you aren't going to get tropical thunderstorms out of just one week of hot weather any more than you are going to get 400 bhp from a 1.2 corsa engine. What we need is a prolonged spell of very hot weather, say a month to six weeks, then for it to break down with a cold front passing through. This would give us a widespread outbreak of powerful storms.

Quite a lot of convection up here today, wouldn't be surprised to see a storm today.

Nice footage! I wouldn't mind a rerun of the 2006 thunderstorms, what a summer that was.

Hehe! I might have a look at that when it comes out if I remember though this thread will have probably been auto pruned by then, not sure if this area gets archived.

I'll bet it was a streamer in the footage but because there was no delay between the flash and thunder (like at the Wimbledon storm) it looked like a hit when the footage was played back. Why they said it was Wimbledon I don't know but my guess is that it was either a mistake by someone on the production team who was at said Wimbledon storm and didn't read the archive tape properly or they simply changed the names around because everyone has heard of it even if they aren't tennis fans.

Probably because of how long ago it was, there was no internet in 1985.

Early days yet, the rest of the week should see more widespread activity kicking off.

It may have been a streamer that fired off his racquet but didn't connect and the bolt hit elsewhere nearby, causing it to look like he was hit from that angle when he was not.

I used to use a strike alert (which was forever falling to pieces and giving constant false positives) until I bought in to the smartphone market 3 years back, since then I have used services I can access from them like our beloved net weather extra and sms alerts. Alert comes in and I fire up extra / gps radar overlays and such and instantly I have the starship Enterprises' sensor display in my hand. Going even further back I would use my stereo with a decent antenna in the long wave socket, I even used to tape the sounds big storms made on those frequencies as they passed by.

Tomorrow, no. Midweek onwards looks like our best bet.

Looking like there could be quite an active week on the way for storm fans.

Nice, been close to a few like that in the past! Videos don't do it justice at that range as it frightens the life out of you even if you are under cover simply because of how loud it is.

Some nice towering cumulus around here now, I don't think it will form any storms but the low chance is still there!

I remember taping these too, I still have the weather watch book somewhere.

This. For me to classify something as a lightning storm it needs to have had numerous lightning strikes no more than 3 to 5 minutes apart and last a reasonable amount of time, anything else is just a weakly electrified cloud. Ideally it should have thunder too but since you can observe storms at night from a long way away (at least from the higher points around here) this isn't a requirement for me. I've wondered the same, we never seem to get as many these days. I got one last year though it wasn't as powerful as the ones I remember in the 90s, they never seem to be these days.

Heard a rumble of thunder a few minutes ago, quite a lot of big clouds around here now.

Light hail shower here again as a CB just grazed the area, these showers here are definitely being caused by the terrain assisting convection. Don't bother, pulse storm activity is always a letdown when I've been looking.

Surprised I haven't heard any thunder here yet, some of these cells are very mean looking. ^ This is that blob on the radar to the south of me here:

Just starting to fire up now it seems in the west looking at the extra radar, the next few hours could be quite interesting.

I can see that big blob on the radar to the south of me now as a nice anvil in the twilight, shame there's no electrical activity in it as it would look really nice this time of the evening.

I wonder if most of these radar blobs are actually producing precipitation which is reaching the ground? As that area which just passed over me produced nothing but fall streaks.

Indeed, it is behaving rather strangely that area.

Because I am west of it and that is where it was going. Looks like it is fading and rebuilding to the north now however with more local activity forming here.