Hazy sun and now 32.4C after dropping from 33C max here to 27.6c in few minutes from few drop of rain earlier on.  

There's that fin de canicule feeling about this now, isn't there. The last, heroic bursts of heat before we return to normality. 3 days on the trot of 35C isn't bad.

Tomorrow is variously modelled as getting to 32C (GFS), 27C (ICON) and 29C (Arome). Interesting how high GFS is. It would be nice to have one final bonus day of 30C. We then seem set for a slow but inexorable - and damp - decline towards a late August rain and wind fest. Still time for that to change though. I quite fancied a couple of weeks of thundery weather in the mid to high 20s.

Tbh I would be perfectly happy not to see 30c until next summer. Fed up to the back teeth with all this heat & humidity now.

Just hope we see a storm and don’t want to have to go through this for nothing. Short changed comes to mind, if nothing happens.

Not too biblical though eh!

Just need the first 10 words for me and that applies any time of year!

Amazing when you look at it.

In the 60s the coldest summer max was 27.8 (1962), 4 years failed to reach 30

In the 70s the coldest summer max was 28.0 (1974), 3 years failed to reach 30.

In the 80s the coldest summer max was 29.4 (1980), 2 years failed to reach 30.

In the 90s it was 29.7 (1993), just one year failed to reach 30.

In the 2000s, it was 30.1 (2007), every year thus reached 30.

In the 2010s, 31.7 (2010), every year thus reached 30 (and 31, only 1 year failed to reach 32).

Data from Trevor's great site here:

https://www.trevorharley.com/hottest-day-of-each-year-from-1900.html

Yes I downloaded the 5km grid daily data of Maximum Temperature for my Location (Kew) the other day and then filtered for high summer Mid July to Mid August

Doing the "best fit" on this summer data showed a trend rise of over 3.2C between 1961  and 2018 (as revent as it goes for this data)

That is fascinating in that the trend is so constant. The 2010s bit is scary when you read to the end of the line.

Even more frightening when all of the last six years have recorded 34 and four of them 35!

Hit 35c today, this the highest temperature here since 2006 , I recorded 36c on the 19th July 2006

Since Friday 7th - 28c , Saturday 31c , Sunday 26c, Monday 30c, Tuesday 32.5c

Big storm brewing to East, towering clouds, on the radar Oxford and Swindon seem to be getting it, although now the wind has really picked up strongly, temp dropped from 32.5c to 28c

Do RAF planes follow storms? a big galaxy aircraft did a few loops overhead

Brize Norton dropped from 34.2 to 22.9 between 5pm and 6pm. Quite an impressive plunge!

35.4 the max at Heathrow seems to be the highest of those I can see. 

On the contrary, I'd be perfectly happy for it to continue until the end of September👍

Maxed at 33.4C here. 

Just up the road from me and yes it was remarkable. There were very strong cool gusty outflow winds ahead of the storms.

Max temp here was 34.7*C around lunchtime, and it's still 27.9*C, so it still feels like a heatwave.  All the thundery showers kicked off to the north and west of here, though there is a big area of rain shown on the radar just leaving the French coast and heading NWwards, which we might catch the eastern end of here.

Yes it’s a bit of an unusual order of things. I think because the start of this event was a big surge of Southerly hot air followed by a stagnation, rather than the canonical British heatwave which is:

• Cold frontal clearance


• High pressure ridge moves in over UK: warm days but coolish nights


• High pressure becomes cut off and retreats Eastward


• pressure drops but hot air starts to be sucked up from Continent


• hottest day under SSE flow but thundery breakdown pm


• Cold front moves in, Mildenhall records final hot temp of the event

That was one of the hottest heatwaves we have had here since 76. It felt worse to me , but that is probably due to age. Can,t say i was really bothered by hot days and nights at 16 years old.

Indeed.

Age takes its toll on one's appreciation of certain types of weather event.

I do not recall feeling quite so poleaxed during the summer of '76.

But it was a long time ago.

Average max of 31.1c for that period. Amazing.

+ max 35.4 today so we are at HDDs of 31.5. Is that it, or might tomorrow give us an extra one of two? Then that really will be it.

I think they’re saying that just because there aren’t good enough day by day records further back to be sure. There’s nothing in the 20th century in any of the weather records that gets close to 6 days of 34+.

The best comparison I can make with this spell is  January 1987.

It’s just bad reporting by the Met Office. They say “first time since 1961” but what they actually mean is first time on record, and the digital records go back to 1961. 

I work in communications, and I reckon the accuracy and clarity of the Met’s comms leave a lot to be desired at times!