Good stats Rob, does it include May and September? Or just The summer months. 

Edit, see you say three summer months.(long day lol). Makes the stats even more impressive?

The extended May-Sept season is important for things like general feel of the summer. On my summer index by far the top years for May-Sept are 2018 and 1989.

Definitely, and early September often hotter than early June.

Yes if I ever have the time I might extend the stats, but it involves manually transcribing the maxima from the Daily Weather Summaries which is pretty tedious. I don't know of any online source listing daily maxima each day that far back.

And for 1976 the data don't seem to exist online at all - the Daily Weather Reports pre-1980 don't include the overall max as far as I can see, which is a bit of an omission. Just the daily max for each station, rounded to the nearest degree.

FWIW, 2020 might not have had the very high number of days breaking some temperature thresholds (haven't double checked though) but it also had 5 days of 35C+, largely due to the spell almost exactly 2 years ago when 6 days in a row were 34C+.

Good point, I had neglected that one. It was short but very sharp!

Excellent. Just in time for the unsettled spell to set in.

It will take more than a few showers or thunderstorms to tackle the water deficit.

Where are you off to, as lots of area look like continuing to be drier than average?

Norfolk still looks rather dry I think. Chester is a bit more tricky to predict but I doubt it will be a washout.

27.9C here today 

It just doesn't want to reach 28C but still just beats 27.7C last year as the hottest temperature since 2006 and by far the highest August temperature I've recorded in 17 years. Not difficult to achieve given that the old record was so pitifully low it was lower than the September record.

A superb day of Mediterranean type blue skies in complete contrast to the Congolese damb squib of 19th July.

Here in Edinburgh, today's maximum temperature reached 28.3°C at the botanic gardens in Edinburgh, 28°C at Edinburgh Airport and 27.8°C at Edinburgh Gogarbank.

That makes today our hottest day of this month so far and in any other year, that probably would have been more than enough to give us our hottest day of that entire year. That isn't actually the case this year though, although the only reason for that is down to those almost record breaking hot days which we had in July when the temperature rose to above 30°C on two successive days at all three of my local stations.

What we're looking at temperature wise for this summer.

1. A new all time record for July - already recieved.


2. The first time 39C or higher has been recieved - already recieved.


3. The first time 40C or higher has been recieved - already recieved.


4. A new all time temperature record for August.


5. The first time 38C or higher has been recorded in 2 consecutive summer months.
   
   If we get the last 2 in my list. We'll have had all of the above in one summer. I think that will be one heck of a set to get in one summer.

I don’t think we’ll get anywhere near 38C in this spell. Models aren’t having it. 

At the moment, Gavin P. is taking a well deserved break from YouTube and Mark Vogan is currently sunning himself in Portugal, so there is unlikely to be much content from him in the meantime.

Because of that, video content on YouTube as regards to the latest weather conditions here in the UK is rather limited at the moment, but there is another channel on YouTube called Weekly Weather Updates puts out daily (despite that channel's name) videos which covers similar ground to Gavin P. in terms of the latest model output and ensembles, and occasionally does so in a more detailed manner.

Last night, I was just catching up with those videos and some of the model output which this guy was showing, was pointing towards the possibility of the temperature here in Edinburgh reaching around 31°C in the next day or so which would at the very least, be challenging our own local record which was set in 2019 (we can very close to beating that in July's heat spike, but didn't quite manage to pull that off).

However, the Met Office are predicting that today's temperatures will only be similar to what we experienced during yesterday, without getting any higher that at any time during this latest heatwave.

The BBC on the other hand, aren't even going as high as that and they are predicting that our highest temperatures over the next few days will actually be slightly cooler than yesterday's temperatures at only around 26°C.

Base on that, my hunch is that we probably won't get to 30°C or above during this latest hot spell, although you never know what might happen with our weather and I certainly wouldn't rule anything out just yet.

Currently 27.6C

This time yesterday was only 25.9C, and we still reached 31C. Think 33C is possible today.

Worth pointing out that in Leeds we didn’t exceed 90F at all between 2004 and 2015 (including July 2006). We then reached 33C in July 2015, and now 90F is becoming an easy temperature to exceed. 

Wiggonholt, Sussex 33.5c is the highest I can see so far. So doesn't look like 35c today.  I was brought up near there it really is a tiny place barely a hamlet even. Such a random place for an official WS.

According to the Met Office on Twitter, Wiggonholt has reached 33.8.

Heathrow and Coton in the Elms also above 33.

The 4pm reading at Wiggonholt was 33.6 so still a chance of a 34 I suppose.