It’s been so dry here that even some of the weeds are dying.
We had a few minutes of hard rain in Oxford yesterday about 4pm, but nothing in Somerton. Then about 11pm there was a very light rain but nothing significant. We’re being teased.
Same here in the north, some occasional light showers but nothing much. The temperature is much cooler but can’t open the windows unless I want a fly invasion!
Just had two brief but torrential storms here. Meteo France forecast has changed from this morning where it showed clear skies and hot temps to storms all day 
. Just what we need to charge up out 1660 l of water storage and give the garden a good drenching. Unfortunately I think it’s too late to save a lot of plants that look as though they are 100% dead.
Edit: Looks like a lot of Aude and PO are due storms today so @Jennifer11 and @Shiba should see some I expect.
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I’m sorry about your plants. 
It started raining lightly here a few minutes ago. Not a surprise as it looked very dark, but it’s hard to be confident it will carry on for long. Meteo now thinks it might rain for an hour or two, a change from what it said earlier and no storms are mentioned now. We’ll see.
I hope the rain comes to you, Shiba. 
Two mins of rain, never even soaked any dirt, a couple of claps of thunder and that’s your lot. Grandson’s birthday party for his friends is outside this evening in an inflatable play area with no indoors, just hope it keeps away for that as its clouding up again and I’m not offering to host a load of kids in my house.
Well, my neighbour is currently ‘mowing’ his patch of doormat-grass, sitting on his lawnmower in a thick cloud of dust 
Yep, that’s about right. We did have a biggish storm last night, but water butt and pond still lower than they should be.
According to my meteo forecasts, today is the last hot day, at 34°C, followed by 30°C and lower temps.
However, on my meteo, there’s a tick box for ‘feels like’ temps which all seem to be in the mid-30s.
Can’t escape…!
Don’t know how reliable this holiday meteo is…
I’d be interested to find a reliable long range forecast. The site I use changes its mind from one day to the next, so I take their two-week predictions with a large measure of salt.
A few years ago we went to the Black Mountains in the Aude. Méteo France had predicted a heat wave and we packed accordingly, only to find that the temperature halved overnight. I had to buy proper shoes and a cardie to ge through the rest of our holiday.
There’s no such thing! There can’t be because of the nature of temperature zone/Atlantic weather movement and these days made all the more complex because of the wandering jet stream. And a lot of the historical data used for projections is not longer relevant/reliable with climate change.
I use the Norwegian forecast: yr.no/en, not least because they are quick to update, which means most of the time the rain they briefly promise me quickly disappears.
I also use Clear Outside v1.0 - International Weather Forecasts For Astronomers - I like its detail.
I asked Claude AI –
“Weather is chaotic beyond about 10-14 days, so anything calling itself a “30-day” or “long range” forecast with specific temperatures for a specific day that far out is essentially guessing dressed up as data — several of these sites even admit their long-range numbers are based on historical averages from past years rather than actual atmospheric modeling.
What does exist and is genuinely useful:
For France specifically, Météo-France is the national meteorological service and the most authoritative source. They don’t pretend to give you precise day-by-day forecasts a month out — instead they publish seasonal trend outlooks (warmer/colder, wetter/drier than average for the coming month or season), which is honestly about the limit of what’s scientifically defensible right now.
ECMWF (the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, based in Reading, UK) is the gold standard behind the scenes — most serious European forecasts, including Météo-France’s, draw on ECMWF’s models. They also publish their own seasonal and monthly outlooks.
For genuinely reliable forecasting, the realistic tiers are:
1-10 days: Météo-France or ECMWF-based apps — quite reliable
10-14 days: trend-level accuracy only (temperature/rain tendency, not specifics)
Beyond 2 weeks: only probabilistic seasonal outlooks (e.g., “above-average chance of a warmer/drier month”) are honest — anything more specific isn’t a real forecast
Sites like MeteoBlue do something worth noting: they combine outputs from multiple national forecasting centers (ECMWF, NOAA, UK Met Office, Météo-France, etc.) into an ensemble, which is a legitimate way to gauge confidence — if all the models agree, that’s more trustworthy; if they diverge, it tells you nobody actually knows yet.
So — for genuine long-range planning in France, Météo-France’s seasonal outlook page or ECMWF’s monthly/seasonal forecasts are the most credible options. Anything promising a specific temperature for a specific day 30+ days out should be treated as entertainment, not forecasting."
MeteoBlue…for my area. Choose your area..
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Grey sky overhead in D17, dim light, sounds of thunder booming from the Atlantic direction, and 22°C in the garden. Distant continuous booming and rumbling sounding ominous…but still very far away.
The UK Met Office “10 day trend” on YouTube is often worth watching - it lasts about 10 minutes and they go into more depth about the reasoning behind their forecasts, and often show and compare the predictions of the different computer models, along with the probabilities of the weather turning cooler or hotter etc.
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I’m having a running chat with AI at the moment about the current weather I’m experiencing and the Gironde/Bordeaux area – forest fires - which isn’t that far away.
There are thunderstorms currently helping the fire fighters there, and more than 200,000 people are being let back into their homes.
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That’s what they said on BFM earlier. 
The edge of the storms are getting nearer to me - loud crackling thunder, dimmer light and a steady but light downpour. No wind - yet!
I’m further across than you but can hear thunder. There are bits of cloud. At one point for maybe 1/2 hour the weather forecast said a torrential shower for 10am but now nothing until at least 8pm.
We too, I can see it on the radar map but I think it’s going to swing NW of us. So again, nothing, until maybe this evening.
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