It could even be north of Brighton! 

Interesting that today's EC extended ens has more low pressure just west of Britain for the period 20 June - 10 August (so not just a blip next week).

Which potentially could lead to some very hot plume type events.

From that point onwards GFS and GEM are into proper pattern change - hot plumes and thundery breakdowns - whereas ECM is back into June 2018 territory, sending the jet way to the North. That’s 2 consecutive good runs on ECM. Fingers crossed.

Agreed. ECM 0z still downplays ex-storm Chris and sends it into oblivion in the mid-Atlantic. GFS comes up with a new theme to upset the party by transferring the east European trough to the west. Anything beyond T120 and the models are struggling, but if anything ECM is the more consistent and just seems more plausible to me. 

Huge differences between the big two this morning,  GFS has summer at least for now coming to an abrupt holt while ECM produces a stunning run never has a breakdown and builds a huge high over the UK by the end. Someone on the other side has posted last night's ECM ensemble clusters and its basically a 50/50 split between what this morning's ECM and GFS Ops are showing.

I think that ECM seems more plausible when one takes into account the pattern that has dominated proceedings for rather a long time now. High pressure never seems to have been that far away at any time over the last couple of months and ECM's solution seems to fit in better with that them compared to what is shown by GFS.

It should be remembered also that a couple of weeks ago, GFS in a few op runs showed an unsettled period developing at the start of last week with a LP moving up from the south over the UK. ECM briefly played around with that idea too, but never really bought into it in the way that GFS did for a while.

Trouble is - we have an ex tropical cyclone moving into the Atlantic fron the US coast. This could do either of two things.

1. Turbocharge the heatwave.
2. Move across the country and trash the heatwave an almost in effect end the summer. I hope it isn't no 2.

We're still in the first third of July. One Atlantic cyclone isn't going to "end the summer" even if it does move across the UK.

ECM seems to have backed off from the generally more unsettled scenario it was going for in a few runs up to and including yesterday morning. Now it seems to be indicating the ex-tropical storm to almost fade into nothing while a separate LP system passes over Iceland with an attendant from crossing the country from the west early next week. After that has happened, ECM then seems to indicate that pressure will slowly rebuild over the UK so that we don't really have a breakdown at all. GFS seems to be going for something generally more unsettled this morning but, there again, a couple of weeks ago it showed the heatwave breaking down early last week. I wonder what happened to that.

I very much doubt we are in such a stark 'either/or' type scenario. There must be some viable intermediate solutions on the table. I do recall though on several occasions that an ex tropical storm/hurricane moved into mid-Atlantic and stalled, meaning that hot southerlies were pumped up over us. This may have been quite a bit later in the year though, more like late August/September but I don't see why in principle it couldn't happen in July.

Automated output is still showing rain here on Friday. Looking at Arpege there could be an afternoon downpour but it's hit and miss. GFS as usual goes crazy with the convective rainfall on Friday.

What ex-Chris gets up to will have some effect on how much of an unsettled interlude we get.

That's the conclusion that can be drawn when considering the evolving Pacific forcing pattern (Nino-like).

However, this is not to say that afterwards, it will be really dry again. Signs are that the final third of July onward will tend to see patterns that allow for more in the way of instability in the atmosphere now and then, meaning a good chance of seeing some heavy showers or thunderstorms at times. 

Such a setup does offer plenty of scope for getting some plumes of heat from S or SE of the UK.

What this means is that we've probably not seen the highest heat + humidity combination of the summer yet. My opinions on that are mixed .

Looks like a massive change on the way.

Why worry about 240 to 384 charts or expecting to happen in 10 to 16 days time? they tried to do that for first week of July from 4he charts shown on mid June. 

So you only believe GFS?

Indeed - I see nothing exciting at all. Warm covers it, we may eventually see some rain but my attention is drawn to whether or not we see the furnace at some point in the next 5 weeks. A more normal NW/SE split pattern may well help trigger it. As for the dramatic summer is over style posts well that is not what is shown. 

I've just returned from a week in the lakes. It was bloody roasting non-stop if that helps 🙂 - thank god for the edinburgh cloud shield to cool me down

the metoffice was spot on for the time I was there, whatever powers xcweather (gfs) over-egged cloud cover every single day

Quite right. A poor GFS run to be sure, but ECM holds pretty firm (and the 00Z GFS also had high pressure reasserting itself). Some kind of wobble is pretty much inevitable, but hopefully it will be brief.

A look at the 2m ensemble for London shows how much the op run was off on one. The overall pictures seems to be warming up this week, then as dip early next week, then signs of another warm-up (or not).

You can see the ex cyclone here. Well out of the way.

http://www.wetterzentrale.de/maps/UKMOPEU12_144_1.png

Bleugh.

The Liverpool GEFS are very spikey

That's a horrible chart. If it comes to pass, we can write off the rest of summer for NW England at least (bizarrely, it's far wetter than either Belfast or Glasgow... the driest place in the UK on that run would be Plymouth - just as bizarre)

Where's that bloody easterly flow gone? Perfect conditions.