Seeing now that it's March and the shower season is upon us it must be time for a convection thread.

Anyway the first plume of the season is currently underway across France to tonight with a chance by the look of it Kent getting clipped. Some lightning is being detected. 

This follows a couple of warm days across France with temps into the low 20's even as far north as north central France, and widely in the upper teens elsewhere.. Even we got taste today with mud teens being recorded.

Storms are kicking off over central France now. Quite active, too!

https://www.lightningmaps.org/?lang=en#y=46.4901;x=-14.5221;z=4;t=3;m=sat;r=0;s=0;o=0;b=0.00;n=0;d=2;dl=2;dc=0;.

That's a sign of Spring!

A thunderstorm passed through Hartley, Kent at about 6pm yesterday evening, accompanied by hail.

Was rather amusing as we were rehearsing a rather noisy play & nothing could be heard over the hail & heavy rain on the roof for a while.

A decent chance of a few people seeing a couple early spring thunderstorms in the South West and in South Wales tomorrow afternoon. Decent CAPE and LI for mid-March and steep lapse rates should see a few thundery showers kicking off. Given the low wind shear however, they will most likely be very disorganised and isolated.

Unlikely to see anything up my way, but still it's nice to see that the convection season is starting to kick off again. Hope we have a much better one this year. Last summer was rubbish for thunderstorms.

Very heavy downpours at the moment... not quite torrential but certainly the heaviest in the land. It's quite localised.

Falling in the 28-38mm range.

Not so much as a puddle in Chichester, 20 miles away, but from the radar, Selsey and Bognor 10km south on the coast appear to have copped it

We ended up with around half inch if rain from that. I wonder what caused it?

This chart needs a measles vaccine

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/public/weather/forecast/map#?map=Rainfall&fcTime=1522281600&zoom=7&lon=-2.88&lat=50.66

A few hefty showers going up now with some lightning being detected over Nottinghamshire and North East England at the moment.

https://www.lightningmaps.org

After a fairly bright afternoon, we now have quite a torrential downpour going on here in Edinburgh.

Actually, the day started off on a dull note and then it took well into the afternoon for it to eventually brighten up. Once it did though, all that has done in the end has been to set off these massive showers such as what we are seeing here just now.

EDIT:

The official rainfall figures from this downpour that I have reported above, shows just how localised these events can be and the rain radar map shows that this was just one isolated event. The worst of that has now moved northwards into Fife whilst it has now turned into not a bad evening here.

The end result of this downpour though was that 2.0 mm of rain was recorded at the botanic gardens in Edinburgh during that one hour alone when this downpour happened, whereas nothing at all in the way of rainfall was reported at Edinburgh Gogarbank during that hour, probably as a result of that downpour having missed that particular station altogether.

Heavy thunderstorms are heading inexorably towards East Anglia. Looks like a very noisy night to come.

The storms never quite made it across the southern North Sea, it was too cold (only 6 C off Lowestoft), but it was quite close. Sporadic rain, with odd heavy burst occurred instead.

The storms had intense lightning activity over eastern southern North Sea, Netherlands and Germany.

Some potential from our early season plumette into the weekend, more especially Saturday PM/evening into Sunday for some. Still a ways out, but GFS 12z gives some interesting potential, but I suspect capping will be the issue the further S and E you go.

GFS 12z shows the potential nicely:

Convective Weather's forecast. I usually find them quite accurate with thunderstorms:

http://www.convectiveweather.co.uk/forecast.php?date=2018-04-21

Right over me. Shame I'll be in work, but I'll have my camera up and running just in case.