Even with copious booze and a fan, struggling to sleep. 

Agreed! We'll have lost a lot of the soil moisture from the London / M4 area today too, which will help boost things.

It's going to be a very hot day widely given how many places are still in the 20s as of four in the morning:

https://ukwct.org.uk/weather/obs.jpg 

The copious booze would not have helped. Something I soon learnt in Palawan, where last night's temps would have been cool.

I had my glasses on the bedside table overnight. When I got up and left the air conditioned room they immediately steamed up. 😂 The temperature gradient was 19C to 30C over 10cm. 

And this is why a/c is going to become all-pervasive in the years to come. My shed-on-a-bungalow regularly gets into the 30s, but for a proper house with presumably decent insulation it shows the problem well. Tens of millions will have, and will continue, to endure those temperatures in their houses in the next few days. And regardless of whether people profess to enjoy the heat and humidity, it's a different matter when you're lying there at 2AM covered in sweat!

It's the warmest morning of the spell so far here, 21C at just gone 7 AM and with 32 in the forecast. There will be an ENE'ly picking up during the day (which will push the core of the heat west of London and down to the south coast) and I'm hoping it picks up a bit sooner than modelled! 

I'm expecting the MetO to issue an amber for Friday today - their raw output still shows high 30s in the east/Kent and East Anglia especially, with even a few 40s mixed in. The UKV reflects it well:

https://www.theweatheroutlook.com/charts3/ukv/ukv_custom/ukv_2026_JUN_24_03_60_2mmaxtemp_51.9_0.9_1.png 

Spot on. I enjoy the heat except at night when I'm trying to sleep. I seriously think having a/c installed in the bedrooms was the best investment my wife and I ever made. 

If you look at the Wyoming archives, the max for Camborne was 577.3 on the 0z reading for 19Jul22, while Herstmonceux recorded 577.1 at the same time - and both were lower both before and after that particular reading. If there was a higher reading at an intervening period it didn't show up on the Wyoming search interface - I'd be interested to know what the record actually is!

FWIW Wyoming is reporting 577.6 for Herstmonceux this morning (using the Legacy interface,  it includes the exact thickness near the bottom), and 576.1 for Camborne. 

https://weather.uwyo.edu/upperair/sounding_legacy.html 

This morning here feels like walking into a bathroom after someone has had a hot shower.

BTW TORRO says the record was from 2019 - the famous “not hot at ground level” spell I think?

578 dam at Camborne (Cornwall) on 28 June 2019.

Heathrow had a minimum of 22.1 overnight which is the highest I can see. Strange as it’s not usually one of the warmest overnight stations. 

I pity the poor person who puts the overnight minimums on the Met Office X account - you can just imagine what the replies will be like!

As for the record thickness, interesting - thank you, I hadn't thought of checking 2019! Popping it into the Wyoming archive shows:

              1000 hPa to 500 hPa thickness: 5782.00

So it looks like 578.2 is the one to beat!

Would quite like a 30C for 10am Obs please.

Seems very likely. In previous 36C+ days somewhere has easily breached 30C by 10, in fact I can recall a couple of 9am 30s.

On the very hottest days there's a specific pattern I've noticed, which I don't think we'll get today as it seems to happen on the last culminating day:

- very rapid heating early morning, usually headed by LHR, so that the record is almost reached by midday

- a small plateau early afternoon when other stations catch up with the leader

- a humidity collapse in some sites mid afternoon with DPT falling to 10C or lower

- final peak mid-late afternoon somewhere different

That humidity fall almost looks like a sort of dynamic process, a mini stingjet, and I wonder if it's a pre-frontal feature given the records often fall a day or so before a cold front.

That’ll be way off for here. We are at 24c already and it got to 33c here yesterday and it was a couple of degrees cooler at this time than it is today. 

Also showing 36C on the IoW!

A low of just 22 °C.🥵

Roll on the cooler fresher air.

One thing worth remembering is that those plots are only showing 1 grid point in 30. Therefore, it's likely that there will be significant variations over very small distances that aren't visible.

I probably won't get time, but if I do, I'll plot the full 06Z temperature grid later today.

UKV looks closer to what I’d expect