Convective Outlook: Thu 08 Sep 2022
LOW
SLGT
MDT
HIGH
SVR
What do these risk levels mean?
Convective Outlook

VALID 06:00 UTC Thu 08 Sep 2022 - 05:59 UTC Fri 09 Sep 2022

ISSUED 06:57 UTC Thu 08 Sep 2022

ISSUED BY: Dan

An upper low will meander slowly eastwards across central Britain on Thursday, providing yet another day with widely unstable profiles as cold air aloft lingers above a humid low-level airmass subject to diurnal heating inland and persistently warm SSTs. PVA on the forward (i.e. NE side) will encourage a broader area of heavy, partially convective rainfall to affect parts of N England / S Scotland, with perhaps some embedded sporadic lightning in places. Lines of torrential downpours in eastern Scotland will likely slowly ease through the morning hours.

Elsewhere, scattered showers and thunderstorms will become more numerous through the day, with a fair number of thunderstorms likely during the afternoon and evening hours - particularly focussed across Wales, the Midlands, East Anglia and southern portions of northern England. Shear will be rather weak across most areas, directly underneath the upper low, but around the periphery some modest (10-20kt) shear is possible across far SW England and also far northern England into southern Scotland. As such, most storms will tend to be of pulse-type, collapsing and generating neighbouring cells due to cold pool development and outflow boundary interactions. CAPE of 500-1,000 J/kg CAPE will likely result in numerous scattered thunderstorms, some perhaps morphing into clusters in places. Due to weak steering flow in central areas the slow storm motion could lead to localised surface water flooding.

Showers/storms will generally fade inland through the evening hours, but will likely persist throughout the evening and night through the English Channel and Cen S / SE England into the southern North Sea (including just off the East Anglia coast), driven by a PV lobe sliding eastwards along the southern periphery of the upper low. Here a local flooding risk continues through the night given the frequency of showers in places. Hail and gusty winds an additional hazard here also. Increasing low-level convergence later in the night may prove favourable for several waterspouts off the Kent and East Sussex coast.