A few rumbles of thunder around 7am but no rain.

Now it is raining hard from a uniform grey sky but no thunder.

I'm not a fan of these high based storms.

Hi, Ian! Grey skies with light rain here atm. I'm glad the missus woke me this morning to see the 'action'! I'm a night owl getting most of the thundery events up here in the early mornings!  The west side of Stoke caught a barrage of CG's early this morning, going by the ATD radar - IF i'd been awake at that time I probably would've been hearing deeep rumblings from those - especially as they probably would've been powerful bolts from the high cloud base  I think it's 'Game Over' here for today.

Looking at the radar we have a couple of hours of intense non intense thundery non thundery rain to come before, no doubt, we have some intense, non intense cloud. Which is nice.

The killer storms have clearly warped your mind

I was woken up by a mighy crash of thunder sometime after 8. According to facebook reports the lightning preceeding it was incredibly bright. There were a couple of other big rumbles follwed by some torrential rain until about 10 ish. This next lot has been just rain. Not as dramatic as expected but at least I got to hear some properly loud thunder.

Big clap of thunder this morning, and since then it's been pretty much wet ever since. 15.8mm so far.

One of the features of these high-based continental thundery conditions is the apparent randomness of the initiation process for storm development. It's very hard to predict where and how any place will be affected due to the convective nature of the conditions before you even get into where the activity will spark in the first place.

Around 6am you may have thought that the central-south of England would have seen its activity already, what there was of it, but then there was a sudden eruption of activity around Cherbourg that seemed destined to hit the UK between Southampton and Portsmouth. If that wasn't confusing enough, storms then broke out well ahead of that area, seemingly from nothing and Basingstoke had a tidy storm around 8am, followed by the Cherbourg storm area shortly after.

The triggers for high-based storms are somewhat different to the low-based convection that relies simply on ground heat and I recall Bren explaining why these upper developments are so seemingly random back in the day. I suspect Ben may have an answer  

Managed to catch a couple of nice storms this morning. Nothing spectacular but decent nonetheless.

Caught the start of the first storm moving into Basingstoke at 08:15 just as I was driving out. Saw a couple of decent lightning strikes followed by some fairly torrential rain as I got onto the motorway.

Then caught the second more significant mass of rain as I arrived in Romsey at 09:00. Some quite close lightning strikes at that point as I was walking in the town. The lightning was very pink. Some large puddles formed on the roads quite quickly.

It certainly has been changeable today and the weather systems seem to have been fairly quick moving.  The day started bright and sunny with no sign of rain, but the thunder and lightning came in quickly but lasted no more than 15 minutes before moving on and giving way to a short bright spell.  Then it turned grey and showery until mid afternoon and now it's sunny and warm. 

Oh dear Mike how predictable of you.

The Met said nothing about giant hail in their warnings.

Some places did get hit from some pretty potent storms while others sow very little but thats the way of plumes.

I think the problem here is combining the Meto with other media a la the Express in one sentence!

In fact thats a line The Express try in their articles by squeezing in  aquote from the meto to "authenticate" the headline

This storm seems to be moving NE towards Stoke >> http://oi59.tinypic.com/jj5thv.jpg

It fizzled out around Market Drayton. A few sferics recently around the Nantwich area. I'm underneath the remains of the anvils from these atm - just some moderate rain - the big ploppy-type, earlier!   

Edit 19.27 BST.. couple of close sferics on the AM radio just now probably this storm may have re-activated! 

Some CG's around the Ellesmere Port area showing on the ATD radar and a fair few crackles on the AM radio - most likely emanating from that area 

Have a look at what you could've won: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWECk-VBXiM
Belgium v Tunisia friendly suspended due to hailstones from the sucker cell over Brussels.

The cell looks impressive to the far NW from here! 

Much more interesting than the football!  The lightning radar sure is well lit-up for that area!