ShinyDave

We had rain, I think - at the very least we had cloud cover that should have produced some and the radar said it did, although I never heard any - but it's all gone properly bright and warm again. Less warm, and a bit less bright - there's actual cloud cover - but still with the feel of capital-S Summer whether you like it or (like me) not. Hopefully this is a gradual off-ramp to an innocuous week ahead. But as someone who suffers from anxiety and sound sensitivity, I fear a thundery breakdown over the next 36 hours...

Getting something of that here too, a couple of degrees warmer and the clouds seem to have no idea whether to drop the deluge or not but they're there blocking out the evil daystar. It's coming home It's coming Weather's coming home...

Both more prolonged and also a more westerly focus - certainly here in South Wales it has been every bit as bad as July was, but for longer. I want to be super excited for the end of this but that would imply having feelings right now.

OOF yeah I just noticed my area is showing less of a rainfall prospect than before. Not none, but less, and in the circumstances not nearly enough. The evil daystar seems to be muted after today but...

As someone who doesn't adjust well to most sensory input (temperature included) as a result of being autistic, I must say I thought today would feel even worse than it did (although I've been entirely inside and downstairs). Got to the point where I think I'm dreading the thundery breakdown - again, sensory overload - more than I am the continuation of the heat? I do feel quite excited about the prospect of feeling cold again though... can hug my (even more heat-sensitive) partner a lot more

And of course this season started a bit earlier than usual. This would have been the first rather than second Premier League weekend in most seasons, but the season got bumped to prevent a major tournament being played in even worse conditions than this. In 2003-4 the Premier League season started on 16 August, the then-record temperatures came the weekend before. There were Football League matches that weekend; Millwall-Wigan on 9 August 2003 (when multiple London stations, including Greenwich not far from The Den, recorded 36C) may have been the hottest, and this will likely not quite be topped today. The Community Shield the next day would have been the undisputed record-holder, but that was the Wembley reconstruction era so it was played in Cardiff. The Women's Euros took place last month of course, but there were no games on the 19th and the two games on the 18th were 8pm kickoffs in Rotherham and Manchester. Despite that, the former (recorded by UEFA as 35C) is still a contender for being the hottest professional football match ever played in England, at least at kickoff.

Oh joy I'm at the "I'm terrified of the thunderstorm that ends this" stage of the heatwave. But at least it would mean an end to this heatwave...

This, tbh. 2022-23 would be the worst possible timing for anything like the kind of winter we saw in 2010-11 given the energy prices (and their geopolitical context!) - and that is the context for which I would hope for a mild winter this year. (A wet one, too. Significant infrastructure is crying out for a winter full of frontal rain.) In a vacuum, I too would happily take a winter full of sharp cold and plenty of snow, especially if it meant avoiding dangerous Atlantic storms like Eunice (the single most terrifying buildup to a weather event I can ever remember). We don't live in a vacuum. And so as @Sunny76 said, a cold winter (even without that context, but dramatically moreso with it) would have a death toll to dwarf this heat - and it's not like the death toll from this heat is small either, the provisional estimate for last month's heat storm was 1,000 excess deaths.

That's really interesting - could it be particularly evident at the moment because the drought conditions over most of England reduce how much heat the ground absorbs? That feels like the sort of thing that models could plausibly miss as a variable even if it has a material effect.

...and, of course, "GFS goes too high" was the prevailing assumption for their long-range forecasts last month right up until they actually happened...

My preferences skew quieter than yours but wet and windy weather always feels so much better as a prospect when the alternative is... this. Even ignoring the duration problem, this is going to be as bad at the peak as last month was for us because the peak is more westerly... If this is the new summer normal, Lerwick is going to be a property market hotspot - pun not intended...

Don't think anywhere in SE Wales got past the 35C mark last month - models plural now to suggest that somewhere will this time. Certainly looks like this heatwave will have a more westerly peak than the last.

Just along the Severn Estuary here and dreading it too! Could not believe when some of the models suggested we'd get it about as bad as anywhere in the UK to be honest. Might genuinely end up being worse than last month was, and for longer. *cries penguin tears*

More than a few critical pieces of infrastructure need one... That's the bit I really don't get. I understand that many and perhaps most people actually like the evil daystar on some level and benefit as much from its presence as I, with penguin-like thermal preferences and bat-like lighting preferences, benefit from its absence. But when it starts adding disruption to an already disrupted infrastructure...

The thing with the long-term model runs a couple of weeks ago was that they showed there was always the heat there to tap into, it was just a matter of if the setup would do so. And here we are. Curious about this GFS run showing the Sunday maxima in the Severn Estuary area? Pretty sure that would be some local station records going if this chart's on the nose.