Until now, I haven't been paying a lot of attention to next week's possible record heat as I had been hoping that this would just be an England (and Wales) only event just like those earlier hotter spells during June but I am now starting to get a bit concerned about one or two of the model runs which have appeared just lately.
These are of course, the same model runs which are still showing the possibility of record breaking heat down south. Luckily for us, it's still not expected to get as hot as that here but even with that, one of two of those runs have started to indicate that we could see temperatures of over 30°C here in Scotland, possibly even as far north as the Moray Firth up in NE Scotland.
One thing to bear in mind here,is that our own record high temperature here in Edinburgh is only 31.6°C at Edinburgh Gogarbank and that was only set on 25 July 2019, the same day that the more famous record was set down in Cambridge. If those charts are right which I have just mentioned, there is the chance that this record could actually be beaten on either next Monday or next Tuesday.
One reason why this is important is because I will be making my annual summer trip to Hawick in the Scottish Borders next week to visit my family. When I was down there last year, the weather was sunny just about all the time. Even with that, the temperature didn't get any higher than 27°C at any time. That is what we had here in Edinburgh just a couple of days, and is more than hot enough for me.
This means that my upcoming trip down there has the potential to be even hotter than that, especially to start off with before it then becomes cooler and more unsettled for a short spell before high pressure possibly builds in again during the weekend before I return home.
When we had those really high temperatures back in 2019, I was lucky that we had a cooling breeze from off the North Sea which pegged the temperature at the botanic gardens in Edinburgh back to around 26°C on that same day.
During this summer so far though, we haven't had any cooling breezes from off the North Sea up until now because the wind has generally been from the opposite direction. Because of that, it is actually the north of Edinburgh which has been seeing the highest temperatures here in recent days, rather than the other way around.
Even if we did get those cooling breezes though, I'm not even going to be here to be able to benefit from that in any way. This means that if we do get temperatures of 30°C or above at the beginning of next week, I will then end up having to face the full brunt of that, which is something which I'm really not looking forward.
However, there are also a lot of model runs which still have us being a lot cooler at the beginning of next week, so I'm just hoping that it is those cooler model runs which end up being right in this instance.
The north of Edinburgh, usually always missing out on snow events which occur not just within the rest of Scotland or the UK, but also within the rest of Edinburgh.