Evening thunder

weatherobsuk Yeah https://solarham.com/ reporting both the ACE and DISCOVR have detected the arrival of the first CME and should reach Earth within 45 minutes (posted 17:50). Certainly been interesting watching these sites perhaps more closely than I have before over the last few days. Hopefully it saves the best for the hours of darkness!

Ooh, Just logged onto https://spaceweather.com/ and saw: "THE FIRST CME HAS ARRIVED: The first of six CMEs hurled toward Earth by giant sunspot AR3664 is minutes away form striking our planet's magnetic field. It has just passed the DSCOVR spacecraft and will soon close the gap to Earth. This could be a 'Cannibal CME' composed of two or three individual storm clouds--or simply the first of six. We will soon find out." I'm hoping to get out to a dark spot and at least capture something using long exposure time on my phone. Expectations limited this far south in terms of what's visible to the eye but I've never seen it before. The last few times when there's been photos from Dartmoor, Cornwall etc I've had my eye off the ball and only known about it afterwards.

This has to be one of the dullest/most extended dull spells I remember, especially going into Spring. I was on holiday the one cold sunnier week in January, and since returning it has felt almost eternally grey and damp with just the odd day with a bit of sun. All of last week basically seemed grey, except the odd sunny interval yesterday. Once again today, it's cloudy from dawn while most of the country is getting a sunny start. At least winter 2014 had more PM/RPM air and sunshine between the lows. Might see a few sunny intervals tomorrow but not getting my hopes up too high. Similar weather just seems to go on and on: Haven't really had those first 'it feels like spring' days due to cloud/wind/dampness, but at the same time, plant growth seems more advanced than I can remember at this time of year due to endless mild and lack of frosts.

This private station actually reached 20.5C today: https://www.wunderground.com/dashboard/pws/IWESTERR3 Obviously not official and can't be sure it's accurate, but it's a Davis VP2 and there was very strong wind gusts with the foehn (up to 81mph at one point!), so doubt it was over-reading much unless the sensor is not calibrated correctly.

This weather is good for one thing at least: Source: https://grid.iamkate.com/

Thankfully here we've had a fair bit of sunshine and showers type weather recently which don't mind, some nice cloudscapes/CB's as well as blue sky between. The next few days look the same here. It's when it turns dull and damp for days which I don't like. Yesterday was cloudy all day with rain in the morning, but was pretty interesting seeing some of the biggest waves I've seen on the south coast (from a safe distance). The river was high enough to flood parts of the floodplain, but not high enough to flood property as far as I know. Incidentally that's the first time the river got near flood levels this Autumn. October was wet here but not exceptional with no major individual falls of rain.

I think the Met Office have done a very good job really. They identified the main threat areas a few days ago, and the amber warnings still reflect where has had/will get the strongest winds pretty well. Maybe some parts of the amber warnings may only have 'yellow' impacts, but it's a likelihood vs impact matrix, and the warning was not at the top of the likelihood scale. They issue the warnings and guidance, it's up to the relevant authorities to decide what to do with it. They also have to make a call, they can't just say one thing to all the authorities then change it every model run. Yesterday there were still some options further north, and you can't risk cancelling warnings and risk the low centre taking the northern option in the models, even 20-50 miles further north would have been different. Each shift, you can count the number of people that are actually responsible for issuing the warnings etc, and various additional briefings/tasks that come with severe weather, on one hand, and they still have to do everything else such as analysis charts, pages of internal/external guidance, modified fields, etc. Of course many aspects of our media sensationalise and focus on the worst bits, so barely even mention that many inland southern areas won't see much of note, and that winds will fall light most of the night and early morning even here in Devon. A bit annoying because I expect lots of 'what was the fuss about', 'they got it wrong again', despite the fact that what's happened was the forecast for days (the low centre just a touch further south than the average of model runs from a few days ago).

It's funny how this part of Devon seems to get less strong storms than north and west France, and even the SE coast of England. Only Eunice hit the south full on recently (though with amber not red warning here due to a little shelter from Dartmoor etc), otherwise they always seem to have taken the worst winds north of here, or south into the Channel/France over my meteorological memory covering the last couple of decades. Edit: I guess 2014 saw a couple notable events which I wasn't here for (although the sea state/number of storms was the most exceptional, Wales saw a stronger wind event). Perhaps a good thing with trees still pretty leafy, don't want to lose too many..

So two summer like days coming up when I'm doing 12 hour shifts so can't even enjoy the evening, and then it's back to this in time for my leave! I try not to complain too much, and don't think we've had a truly poor summer overall (a couple months yes) in my location since 2015 or before that 2012, but this July and August is crap!

Scientific consensus that human emissions are causing warming is at like 99.9%... Something like 28 out of 88,000 papers are somewhat or entirely skeptical. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2966 or 100% reported here https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0270467619886266 Are you one of the people that seem to have nothing better to do than clog up the Met Office twitter feed?

Last summer featured a poorer spell late June/early July as well I believe. Of course no telling what will happen afterwards this year, factors are different (e.g. El Nino, SSTs) Speaking of the SST's around the UK, the anomalies must in part be due to the persistent high pressure near the north of the UK in recent weeks with plenty of sunshine warming the surface layers, and little wind meaning reduced mixing of the warmer surface layer with colder water below. If the model output comes off with fairly deep low pressures near the north of the UK, I'd expect the anomalies to reduce but probably remain somewhat positive.

Agreed there... A more continental climate there, I guess the 'Baltic' phrase wasn't coined from their summers Agreed with you in that respect, I prefer sunny crisp days (although perhaps not -10C 850s and hard frost in May) as sunshine is more important for mood. It just made me think of April 2021, which I didn't think was too bad as it was quite sunny despite loads of frosts (and I've noticed a few others say that recently). However, in this thread it certainly didn't sound ok at the time, people were moaning just as much as now. As for this weekend, and combined with 2012, the weather really doesn't seem to be a royalist..

Not been a great spring, or March especislly down here especially sunshine wise, but then Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday were decent here with plenty of sunshine. Also I remember that the Easter weekend was Decent. Forecast isn't great but Tuesday and Wednesday showed cloudy on the apps and turned out mostly sunny, so maybe they are over-estimating cloud on some days going forward. Well, maybe sometimes, but at the moment they have -10C 850hpa temps and nighttime temps well below freezing Imagine the moaning in here if we had that in May

Typical timing.. 4 crisp frosty mornings while travelling to work last week, and 5 days with decent amounts of sunshine, followed by cloudy nothing weather on both days this weekend (a common theme of many recent weekend days), before it is forecast to be sunny again on Monday and Tuesday.

Do the GFS ensembles have an issue with under-estimating ocean modification? I've never seen a northerly that cold in the archives but have seen a few examples in the ensembles. Also, I don't know of any archive chart examples a westerly with 850hpa temps approaching -15C, yet we had an ensemble member the other day showing -16C 850's on a westerly. Even the often cited cold zonality of January 1984 didn't quite manage to pull in the -10C 850hpa isotherm from the west. I've noticed over the last couple of years that there have been various ensemble charts showing westerlies/northerlies with 850hpa temps colder than any actual examples I know of. Although I would love to see a NNW wind with -15C - -20C 850's coming down the Irish Sea with the streamer of intense snow showers it would create hitting the SW.. just not that week because it's the first week since 2020 I've been abroad (which increases the chances of it happening!)