Scorcher

Rain All Night Yes I was going to make the point about May 2018- on the face of it it wasn't an outstanding month looking at the charts through the month. High pressure came and went and was generally fairly weak until the last week. Here we had an excellent (and extremely sunny) month despite it not being high pressure dominated until the last week or so.

Rain All Night It's an ensemble mean- it doesn't mean it's definitely going to happen. I think people jump to conclusions by focusing on the mean when the mean is simply a middle ground between the more settled and less settled scenarios. The means shift all the time anyway and aren't very reliable more than 5 days out. Only about 10 days ago the ensemble mean was showing prolonged below average temperatures and within 2 days it had flipped to above average 850 hPa temps.

cheese You can almost sense the excitement from some when they see a hint that things might be going wrong.

Alderc 2.0 Potential question marks about Tuesday looking at the fax charts but I can't see rain being an issue after that at all.

Alderc 2.0 The Met Office- who are notoriously conservative with cloud amounts (and temperatures)- clearly don't agree with your assertion. For this area at least. Where are you getting your info from? I will say though that I am slightly disappointed to see the high looking less robust than it did a couple of days ago.

Not as good from the ECM to be honest. Hopefully an outlier. The GFS is a cracking run tonight right through next weekend for most of us.

In Absence of True Seasons Those temperatures in Scandinavia sound like much of the UK north of the Midlands yesterday. In fact we did much better here than most of the places you mention yesterday. Scandinavia has suffered badly recently with temps in the low single figures and snow into late April- so I don't begrudge them those improved conditions! *Stormforce~beka* You must be a hardy soul then. There are days most years in May when the heating could be justified.

KTtom Nothing new there. The Met Office app is notorious for overestimating cloud.

LetItSnow! Yes I had no idea until yesterday that 1833 wasn't as impressive as I thought. It's not really a level playing field if it's being compared to modern Mays with the data being collected across the country.

Weather-history Yes I find it quite puzzling to be honest as May and June are the two months that could go much higher than they have. I know it will never be the norm to expect 14C+ Mays due to SSTs and seasonal lag but I find it very odd that there hasn't been one month in nearly 200 years that has managed it I imagine part of the reason is night time minima at this time of year. A high pressure dominated May can produce high maxima but nights generally drop into single figures if the high is directly over the UK. 2018 was a prime example here- the average maximum at Rostherne was 19.4C but minima were often in single figures and a fair few nights dropped below 5C.

LetItSnow! When does the GFS not do that in deep FI though? It almost always shows a dramatic breakdown after 7/8 days. Seems almost a default setting for the model for our part of the world.

22.0C max at Rostherne. Can't be too often that we've reached 22C before London here!

Dark Horse If people bothered to look at the forecast or even poked their heads outside before going out, they'd have realised a jacket wasn't necessary at all today. Long sleeves maybe at first but definitely not a coat. I saw several people out around midday in winter coats with the temperature getting close to 20C. Rostherne was 21.6C at 4pm so may have breached 22C at some point during the day- we'll find out later.

Metwatch As I mentioned the other day in another thread, I think the May 1833 record is one that could be absolutely smashed in today's climate- a bit like how April 2007 smashed the previous record by some distance. It's bizarre to me that it's such an anomaly as a much higher CET is theoretically possible in May. I actually think the fact we haven't had another 14C+ May is one of the oddest statistical quirks of the British climate.

Met. It did seem strange for it to be that low. The Pennines make a difference in this sort of setup but not usually 11/12c!