If you’ve been feeling like you’re wading through warm soup every time you step outside, you’re not imagining it. Britain is currently baking under a humid, sticky heat that’s made the simple act of existing feel like a minor athletic achievement.
Temperatures across England and Wales have been nudging into the high 20s this week, with parts of the south-east flirting with 30°C. But it’s not the heat alone that’s getting to people; it’s the humidity. That thick, airless quality to the atmosphere that makes your shirt stick to your back before you’ve even reached the end of the driveway.
The Met Office has flagged the likelihood of thunderstorms rolling in across much of the country over the coming days, as the built-up heat and moisture in the atmosphere look for somewhere to go. These aren’t your gentle summer showers. Forecasters are warning of the potential for heavy downpours, hail, and localised flooding in some areas, particularly across the Midlands and northern England.
“When you get this kind of prolonged humid heat, the atmosphere essentially loads itself up like a pressure cooker,” one meteorologist explained this week. “The storms that follow can be intense, even if they’re short-lived.”
For most of us, the immediate concern is slightly more mundane: whether to risk hanging the washing out. Or, if you’re commuting into a city, bracing yourself for what can only be described as the underground tube experience in July, which is its own kind of endurance sport.
Farmers and gardeners, meanwhile, are watching the sky with a more complicated mix of feelings. The ground in many regions has been parched after weeks of dry weather, so rain is badly needed. But a sudden violent downpour does little good when the earth is too dry to absorb it quickly; it just runs off, causing flash flooding rather than the steady soaking that would actually help.
The yellow weather warnings currently in place cover a wide swathe of the country, and the advice is fairly standard: avoid travel if possible during heavy downpours, watch out for surface water on roads, and don’t stand under a tall tree if the thunder starts.
Whether the storms actually materialise as forecast, or quietly fizzle out over the North Sea, is the question everyone’s been asking. British summer weather has a long and proud tradition of not doing what it’s told.
