squall line just arrived

The sky to the south west of Hatfield lit up about half hour ago. now the rain had arrived some it really heavy.

Heavy downpours on and off all day. Some good cloudscape.

There was a tornado yesterday about 12:40pm in Kingsbridge, South Devon. Doesn't seem that it did much damage I think there's a video somewhere according to the press but I can't find it with a google search.

Plymouth Herald

Oh dear - "mini tornado" - dxckheads

The Met Office precipitation outlook illustrates an interesting Thursday from a convective perspective, with many, many showers piling right across England in particular, along with some well organised features for good measure 

GFS projects 12mm here in the 48 hours starting noon today. It will be interesting to see what the final total is - will GFS have underestimated the convection as I often feel like it does, or will I be left feeling daft?

NAE kills all of the showers right on the South Coast... yeah, that totally makes sense 

There's a vast number of showers piling in from the SW now. They look to bring a lot more precipitation than GFS (let alone NAE) predicted for the morning.

Come the afternoon, GFS sees some more organised stuff moving across England, and the Met Office charts concur, with a rapid-fire of 'popcorn' showers and organised bands.

There's then some more persistent rain looking likely from tomorrow night through Saturday.

The River Avon is back on the rise this morning after 9.2mm over the 48 hours up to the end of yesterday. To be honest I'm surprised to see that response, as it usually varies according to longer time scales - must be the very saturated soils playing their part.

I don't know why there isn't a warning for rainfall there, as it's not hard to see how 30-40mm could accumulate over the next 72 hours.

http://estofex.org/

An interesting ESTOFEX discussion this morning - here's the relevant part:

"Southern British Isles to western France

The west-European mid-level trough expands east during the day. Cold air advection is expected especially at mid-levels, while low-level maritime air masses are advected into the forecast region. Due to strong DCVA, QG lift is expected, and differential cold air advection results in steepening lapse rates from the west. At low levels, a moist south-westerly flow will persist, and weak CAPE will be possible during the day.

Due to the large-scale favourable forcing, showers and thunderstorms forming in the maritime air mass are expected. Especially over the land, strong 0-3 km vertical wind shear will allow for multicells and mesocyclones (favourably low-level veering and 0-3 km SRH around 150 m²/s²). Given a large overlap of strong low-level vertical wind shear (0-1 km bulk shear 12 m/s), mesocyclones and tornadoes are not ruled out. Limiting factors are the rather weak low-level buoyancy and the lack of pronounced low-level warm air advection. Additionally, persistent multicells with bowing segments will be capable of producing severe wind gusts at the leading edge of fast moving cold pools (850 hPa winds around 20 m/s)."

I must admit, some of this terminology does have me reaching for my glossary of terms... 

Thunder reported from Midhurst(Sussex)

Frequent showers at home bringing moderate to heavy precipitation, with numerous downpours too.

Reading was slammed by a lengthy downpour around 2pm - I should know as I was in the thick of it!

The surface water flooding around here is substantial. Yet there is no weather warning from the Met Office. Are they expecting the Environment Agency to handle it all...?

The current radar has more showers on it then I can recall seeing so far this year (yes, over the last 16 days... but the first few days of the year saw a lot of showers too).

Based on all of this, I'm expecting the local rivers to rise again after today racks up something in the range of 15-25mm across Central Southern parts. There's a fair bit more to come Friday and Saturday, too.

Bren reporting thunder in Weybridge(Surrey) in the last hour.

Heavy showers here

Winchester has amassed another 14mm rain today

Hammering down once again. Another convection line. Sferics in the SW this afternoon

Hailstorm!

Just got home and the wife gave me a right rollicking for not warning her of a thunderstorm and heavy torrential rain they had over Frome this afternoon, she got caught out in it and the storm was quite bad for a time.............apparently.  At the time I was tucked away in a cosy little corner at work and never heard a thing.

Heavy hail shower here and dark.

Heavy showers here this afternoon some with soft hail.