Thursday 11th September
Wednesday was an autumnal day with a strong southerly breeze gusting at one time to 23mph. The cloud built up late morning with a brief rain shower at 11.00 with showers or light rain on and off all afternoon with the heaviest fall logged at 18.30 when rain fell at the equivalent rate of 144mm/hour. As the cloud built up it limited sunshine, which is why the maximum was logged just after midday at 12.37 with a high of 17.7C being 1.3C below average, only the second below this month. The total rainfall for this month now stands at ……mm against my 41-year average of 66.9mm. The low of 10.7C was logged at 03.57 early Thursday being 3.0C above average thanks to the overnight cloud cover.

Thursday started with weak sunshine through brief gaps in the broken cloud that had raised the temperature to 12.2C by 08.00 with a brisk breeze coming from a southwesterly direction.

The complex low pressure system is anchored for a few days just off the north coast of Scotland that will continue to throw rain bands across the country in the form of scattered showers of varying intensity. It currently as a very low centre of pressure at 975mb this morning. In fact today there are four troughs of low-pressure forecast to cross the UK in a very disturbed period. A low-pressure trough is an elongated area of relatively low atmospheric pressure, often seen as a “dip” or “U-shape” on weather maps, which is characterised by rising air, leading to cloud formation, unsettled weather and potential precipitation like showers of steady rain.

The early data from the new MetOp-SG-A1 weather satellite looks promising, I read, but it’s not ready for public or operational use just yet. The weather satellite is still going through a long commissioning process to make sure everything is working exactly as it should. That includes testing, calibrating, and fine-tuning each instrument to ensure accuracy.