- 17/06/2025
This is an in-depth Met Office UK Weather forecast for the next week and beyond 17/06/2025 – With temperatures rising we look at why it’s hotting up and how hot it’s likely to get. Bringing you this deep dive is Met Office meteorologist Alex Burkill.
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00:00You'll have no doubt heard it is hotting up. There is a heat wave building as we go through this week with temperatures rising into the low, possibly even the mid-30s by the time that we get to the weekend.
00:12I'll be talking about why it's getting hotter and how hot it's likely to be. I'll even be joined by one of our chief meteorologists, Matthew Lennart, joining us for the first time in one of our deep dives.
00:23I'm sure he's got some very interesting things to tell me. But hello, welcome along. Thank you for joining me to this week's deep dive.
00:30I'm Alex Burkle, presenter and meteorologist here at the Met Office, coming to you, as always, from our headquarters in Exeter.
00:36And again, as always, if you like anything I talk about today, do hit that like button.
00:41Make sure you share this with anyone you think will be interested in it. Leave a comment.
00:45I'll try to answer some of the questions later on, or if not, we'll cover them in the Weather Studio Live on Friday.
00:51And also, make sure you subscribe, so you never miss any of these deep dives or any of our other content.
00:58Now, let's get onto that hot weather that's heading our way.
01:01And let's start off by looking at the bigger picture currently across, well, near the UK.
01:07The jet stream is running just to the north of us, well, just over northern parts at the moment.
01:12Not an especially strong jet. It has brought some wet and a bit blustery weather through the last 24 hours or so across parts of the northwest.
01:19And then we have a decaying front that's pushing its way southeastwards.
01:23That's brought a bit of cloud, a bit of drizzly rain.
01:25And that's going to continue to move south and east as we go through the rest of today, really, before clearing away.
01:32And then the big talking point is the high pressure that's building over us.
01:36High pressure, as you'll no doubt be aware, means lots of settled weather.
01:40And we have lots of settled weather to come as we go through the rest of this week.
01:44It's not totally dry. There are still some weak fronts trying to come into northwestern parts and they'll bring a few bits of rain, a bit more cloud at times as well.
01:53But on the whole, high pressure, firmly in control.
01:56And with that high pressure, like I say, we are going to see a lot of dry weather and a lot of sunny weather.
02:01But it's the temperatures that really we're pretty interested in this week.
02:05And if I just pause it there and show us our air mass.
02:08And first of all, I just want to draw your attention to some pretty hot air across Spain that's going to feed into France as well.
02:15Some very high temperatures likely there as we go through this week.
02:20We're not that influenced by that weather for the time being.
02:24In fact, actually, our hot air is coming in a sort of different way.
02:28I'll come on to that in a second.
02:29But what you can see is the high pressure drifts away towards the just towards the east a little bit as we go into this coming weekend.
02:39This is Friday.
02:40By the time we get to Saturday and Sunday, it's drifted a little bit more.
02:43And so that's when we'll start to see the influence a bit more of that very hot air towards the south of us.
02:49That's when it will start to push in that plume of warmer, more humid air that will be coming across the UK.
02:56But that's not really until the weekend, particularly Saturday into Sunday, that we're likely to really feel the influence of that.
03:03But what does that mean then?
03:05Let's look at our temperatures as we go through this week.
03:08And here are our maximum temperatures.
03:09And these are a few places pinpointed.
03:11They're not quite picking out the extreme highest temperatures that we're likely to see.
03:17But if I just dart ahead a couple of days and if now we can see Saturday, Sunday.
03:21So as we go through Thursday, high 20s look quite likely in a fair few places.
03:26By Friday, good chance that we could get into the low 30s.
03:30It could be the first time this year that will exceed 30 Celsius anywhere in the UK.
03:35And then by Saturday, Sunday, even higher temperatures.
03:39I think our most likely maximum temperatures this weekend.
03:42While Saturday, we're looking at around 32 Celsius.
03:45And by Sunday, we're talking maybe 33 Celsius as the most likely high.
03:52There are some question marks about what's going to happen on Sunday.
03:55Because of that plume of warmer air that I showed you, how far west or east it's going to push in.
04:01So exactly how hot it's going to get, still a bit uncertain.
04:04But I think, yeah, let's go with 32 or 33 Celsius.
04:07Now, that's not that far away from the June record, which is only 35.6.
04:13We're going with around a 15% chance that we're going to exceed that June record this weekend, particularly Sunday.
04:22A few things need to line up in order for that to happen.
04:25I'll talk about that with Matthew Lennart, the chief meteorologist, in a second.
04:29But yes, it is turning hot.
04:31It's worth bearing in mind that towards the north of the country, it is going to be a bit fresher than elsewhere.
04:38But nonetheless, still temperatures above average for most places.
04:43And then the other thing to also factor in is around, because of the slight changes in our, where our air is coming from, wind direction as the high shifts through.
04:52At times, some coastal parts, eastern coastal parts Thursday, Friday, they're going to be a little bit more comfortable perhaps than they have been recently.
04:59A little bit fresher.
05:00But then the temperature is rising as that plume of warm air comes through as we go through this weekend.
05:05So temperatures fluctuating a little bit, depending on where you are.
05:09But maximum temperatures peaking as we go through this weekend when you look at the UK as a whole.
05:17Now, I've talked about the fact that we have that plume of air coming in from the south later on as we go through this weekend.
05:24But it's a little bit more complicated as to where our air is coming from in the run up to that.
05:30If we look at what's happening in the preceding few days.
05:34And now this chart behind me shows the trajectory of the air that's coming towards the UK and where the air has come from in the preceding six days.
05:43This one's looking at Friday afternoon and I've picked St. James's, so central London.
05:48And what it's actually showing is where the parcels of air in the kilometre closest to the surface will have come from in, like I say, the preceding six days.
05:59The yellow is indicating where the air around a thousand metres up will have come from.
06:04And then the greens to the blues, we're looking at the air closer to the surface where that will have come from.
06:10And it's an interesting chart because it goes back and it helps us understand what exactly is going on.
06:18Now, to help me go through this in a little bit more detail, I'm joined now by Matthew Lennart, one of our chief meteorologists here at the Met Office.
06:27So, Matthew, what exactly does this mean?
06:29So, are airs not coming from the south this time?
06:32No, no. And in actual fact, across quite a few hot events in recent past, we've seen this happen.
06:39And in this particular case, what we've got is air mass that six days before Friday, so at the beginning of this week, is actually being sourced from an area south of Greenland.
06:48So, kind of the Labrador area of northwest Atlanta.
06:50Not a notoriously warm place.
06:52No, not at all.
06:53Especially when you look at this plot down here and see a lot of this air has actually come up from about three to four kilometres above the ground.
07:00So, not even cold by any absolute mean.
07:03You can see it down here, it's kind of minus ten, this air mass, six days beforehand.
07:09But as it comes towards the UK, it comes across the Atlantic, goes to the north of us, then wraps round through, well, Belgium, north France, and then does eventually come towards us.
07:19The air's lowering, isn't it?
07:21It's sinking.
07:22Yes.
07:22And it's that sinking process that's leading to it warming up.
07:25Yeah, so when we've got areas of high pressure, the air generally sinks, but this is quite a notable case because a lot of this air is starting off at three to four kilometres up.
07:35And as it sinks over the course of two or three days, it's warming at about 10 Celsius per kilometre.
07:41So, do that over three kilometres, and that's 30 Celsius of warming.
07:45And so that's why we're seeing some pretty high temperatures.
07:48And then there's, as it gets very close to us, there's a little kick at the end, isn't there?
07:53Yeah, so at this point here, this is where these air parcels are running over the low countries, so Belgium, Netherlands, perhaps the far north of France.
08:01And it's at this point where the sun, pretty much the strongest you're going to get, given the solstice on the 21st.
08:07And that is where you're starting to get that strong sunshine having an impact, and that will boost the temperatures a little bit more.
08:13So they've gone through 30 Celsius of warming by descending closer to the surface, and then you get a day's worth of heating as it comes into the UK on Friday.
08:21So on Friday, towards the end of the week, although there's some very hot air across parts of Iberia, that's not really the driving force behind our temperatures being so high.
08:32But things do change a little bit as we go through the weekend.
08:34So now we've got the chart this time for Saturday afternoon, and we can see the air is taking a little bit more of a southerly route before it comes towards us.
08:43That's right?
08:43That's right.
08:44So at this point, you can see that the time spent over northwest Europe, especially parts of West Germany, the low countries in northern France, there's a bit more time there where the air is in contact with the ground.
08:55So you can see that on this plot here, this is the height above ground level, and you can see that we've got a good 24 hours.
09:01In actual fact, some of them are up to 48 hours in contact with the ground.
09:05So instead of having just that day-on-day descent of the air and warming that up, we've now got a couple of days of heating from the sun to boost that.
09:16And now we're starting to see the temperatures rise even further.
09:19And then if we go into Sunday, it becomes a bit more of a mess.
09:22It does.
09:23But there are two things to draw attention to.
09:27A, the original air is coming from a bit more to the south before it wraps round, so a slightly warmer direction initially.
09:34And then it's wrapping round in France a bit more as well, where it's really hot.
09:39Exactly.
09:39So we're starting again, three to four kilometres up.
09:41There's a lot of the parcels of air that are coming from three to four kilometres up.
09:45But what they're doing is spending a good two to three days over the near continent.
09:50At this time of the year, where you've only got a handful of hours of darkness, that means you can get a lot of heating in with those parcels of air close to the surface.
09:58And they've got pretty short land track as well, because it's coming in on a southeasterly breeze.
10:02So it's a pretty short track over the North Sea or the English Channel before it comes in across southeast England.
10:08And at that point, we've now got the temperatures really rising, potentially into the low 30s of Celsius.
10:15And so that's why it's likely to be Sunday when we see the absolute highest temperatures of this hot spell.
10:22Not everywhere you see the highest temperatures on Sunday.
10:25Some places will have it a little bit earlier.
10:27Let's look at our meteor grounds from ECMWF for our capital cities.
10:31And maybe if we start off with Belfast, and it paints an interesting picture.
10:35Temperature's a little bit above average for the time of year, but they're peaking probably Friday, Saturday time.
10:40And then there's quite a spread for Sunday, isn't there?
10:43Yeah, so this is something we'll see on all the charts.
10:46But there's pretty good confidence, and there's very small whiskers to these plots here,
10:51which means there's quite high confidence in this rise in temperature once we get to Friday.
10:55Once we get beyond Friday, though, for Belfast, you can see that the temperatures are starting to have a bit more uncertainty.
11:01The box and the whiskers are getting a bit further apart, and that means there's more spread in the possible outcomes.
11:07And so as we go through the weekend in Belfast, it's most likely that temperatures peak there Friday into Saturday.
11:13But just how quickly those temperatures start to drop away is a little bit more uncertain.
11:18But it does look as if it will be a bit earlier there to places further south and east.
11:22So for them, if we look at south, I mean, Edinburgh is a bit further east,
11:25so slightly delayed compared to Belfast, but similar story.
11:28Whereas London, it looks like the highest temperatures are going to be on Sunday.
11:34But the thing that we want to draw attention to is the spread.
11:38Yes.
11:38And yes, there is a large spread, relatively, because there are some question marks about exactly what's going to happen with Sunday.
11:45But I think the interesting thing is that the spread above the most likely temperatures that we're going to see on Sunday,
11:54so what, 32, 33, that's quite a small spread above.
11:58So less likely to get much higher than 33 or 34.
12:02But there's actually quite a big spread below.
12:06And so the chance of us getting several degrees lower than the most likely is higher than just a couple of degrees a bit warmer.
12:14And that's a bit of a tricky one to get my head around, but I think you're going to help me.
12:18So we've got a teffigram here.
12:21If you're a regular deep-dive 10-day trend viewer, you'll have seen teffigrams lots of times before.
12:26They show us a profile of air going up through the atmosphere.
12:30Yes, I know all the things are slanted.
12:32That's to make things a little bit simpler.
12:33Now, remember, the black solid line is our dry parcel of air.
12:37And it's this inversion here, isn't it, that's important for Sunday.
12:42Yes, so what we've got through the weekend is that we start to bring up some of that warmer air from the near continent.
12:49That is in this area here, which is above the surface.
12:52And that is acting as a bit of a lid and allows us to concentrate the heating of the air close to the surface in this very shallow layer, or fairly shallow layer.
13:03It's about 5,000 foot deep.
13:05So above 5,000 feet, we have this capping inversion.
13:08Yes, absolutely.
13:09And what we've got then is that the strong sunshine, it can heat that air and the temperature rises steadily through the course of the day.
13:18But it's just heating, only needs to heat that bottom 5,000 feet, right?
13:23Yes, that's right, yeah.
13:24But if we didn't have that here, it would mean that the temperature rise would be a lot slower.
13:29Think of it a bit like boiling a kettle.
13:31If you've got to boil a kettle and it's only got, I don't know, a couple of cups of teas worth of water in it, and you set it going, it will go ping fairly quickly.
13:42It will get up to temperature pretty quickly.
13:44If you fill it up full, it takes a lot longer.
13:47And the same is happening here.
13:49If we were to heat, say, the lowest 10,000 foot rather than the lowest 5,000 foot, it would take a lot longer to realise the same temperature.
13:58Because there's more air to heat up.
14:00Exactly, yeah.
14:00And if we start to get higher temperatures, so 35, then we'd be looking at the air being able to pass over the inversion, that capping inversion.
14:12And so then it would need to be warming that 10,000 feet, that bigger thickness of air.
14:19And so that's why that's then less likely.
14:24So we may get to those sort of temperatures where we're close to getting above the inversion.
14:28But if we do, we won't have the energy there to make much of a difference to rise the temperatures much more because of that bigger amount of air we're having to absorb.
14:37That's right, yeah.
14:38So if you take this parcel of air and you took it down towards the surface, it would be about 35 Celsius.
14:44It's something we call potential temperature.
14:46And once we heat the air mass below that to 35 Celsius, it then means that we're going to be, a parcel of air will continue on its way much higher than it would have done prior to that temperature.
14:59So it acts really as an upper limit to where the temperature can rise.
15:02And we saw this back in 2022 with the extreme heat of the 40 Celsius.
15:06The potential temperature of that air mass was a little bit more.
15:10But then once you got beyond that, the potential to go, say, 42, 43 was limited because you'd have to start heating up not just that lowest level of air, but a much deeper layer.
15:21And it just progressively got higher and higher.
15:23It's also happening at the time of the day when the sun is starting to get lower in the sky.
15:29So the amount of available energy to get things higher as far as temperature is concerned is that more limited.
15:36So 35 and around the record for June of 35.6 is about the limit at which we can expect temperatures to rise in this air mass because the cap is what it is.
15:48It's not our most likely forecast temperature for this coming weekend, but I get you, it's very unlikely to get much higher than that.
15:57Absolutely, yeah.
15:58And there's the other thing that we should mention, the dotted line showing dew point.
16:03And so the closer they are together, the higher the humidity.
16:07So this area shows that there's some cloud aloft and a bit of cloud coming through.
16:11Well, that can make all the difference.
16:12Yes. So with this particular tephogram, got that area around about 12,000, 14,000 foot.
16:20We're often seen in these kinds of air masses, you often get some very high out of cumulus, out of cumulus castellanus type cloud.
16:27And that can just knock the temperature back a bit.
16:29And that means that you could see those bottom end of the temperature distribution being realised if that started to precipitate, for example.
16:37At the moment, it looks as if that's going to be fairly limited, but it is another thing that could be a fly in the ointment regarding realising some of those higher temperatures.
16:46So a bit of cloud could really drop the temperatures.
16:49And so that's why there's that large spread below 32, 33 Celsius.
16:52But then because of the capping inversion and then having to heat more air, if we got much higher than 35, say, that means that the chance of getting much higher than 35 is really slim.
17:08Amazing.
17:08Now, one other thing that I wanted to talk to you before we go, because we've already mentioned it, there are some question marks about exactly how things are going to happen this coming weekend.
17:17So I want to show you the postage stamps looking at the wet bulb potential temperature at 850 hectopascals for this coming Saturday.
17:26And I highlighted these because they actually show really good agreement in where the position of the plume of warmer air is likely to be.
17:36They're not identical, but most of them have it somewhere around the west of the UK.
17:42But if we look at the same chart, but this time for Sunday, and there's a much bigger spread, isn't there?
17:48Yes.
17:48So on this one, you can see top left-hand corner, this is the control run.
17:53And this is the one that is probably about middle ground for this particular setup.
17:59You can see that on Sunday, that's concentrated across the kind of eastern central parts of the UK.
18:05It's already started to cool down in the west.
18:07And so this is the axis of hottest conditions expected.
18:11But if you go and take a look at, say, member 7 here, you can see that that plume in that particular model run is way out over parts of France, low countries.
18:22And that is another way that we could end up with somewhat less hot conditions by the time we get to Sunday.
18:28Equally, we could pick out another member, say member 9 here.
18:32You can see that that's actually pushed a little bit further west.
18:34And so a little bit of uncertainty over just how quickly temperatures could cool off in the west.
18:38So not only have you got that uncertainty over a little bit of cloud coming over the top, so perhaps a few showers around over the weekend too,
18:45but it's also the axis of where the warmest air aloft is, where that cap exists to allow that temperature to rise.
18:51It's in this little red corridor here where those temperatures, if they can sit over the UK and coincide with peak heating over the weekend,
18:59that's where we're likely to see the highest temperatures.
19:01But there is still a little bit to play for by the time we get to Sunday.
19:05So all still to play for in terms of exactly how hot it's going to get.
19:10But it does look likely we are going to have some pretty hot weather just exactly when we see the highest temperatures and exactly how high they get.
19:17There are still some question marks.
19:19Thank you so much for joining me, Matthew.
19:20I'll let you get back to your desk.
19:22I know it's been a pretty busy day.
19:23Now, another thing that I want to talk about this coming weekend is our humidity.
19:28And here is a chart showing dew point.
19:31Now, dew point is the temperature at which the air needs to be cooled in order to reach saturation.
19:36So for all the water to be condensed out, the lower the dew point, the drier the air, the lower the humidity.
19:43And what you can see in this chart behind me for this coming Saturday is across central eastern parts of England, the dew point is actually pretty low.
19:53Meanwhile, further west, we have that more humid air across much of Scotland, Northern Ireland and particularly down through Wales and southwest England.
20:01And why is this important?
20:02Well, even though the highest temperatures through Saturday are likely to be across more central and eastern parts of England, the air is actually not going to be particularly humid here.
20:15There'll be a bit of a breeze around, so it's not going to be overly oppressive, overly sticky and humid, really.
20:22Meanwhile, a bit further west, particularly over parts of Wales and maybe southwest England, where we have that higher humidity, it's going to be actually pretty uncomfortable.
20:31Probably more uncomfortable than it will have been further east, despite the fact that temperatures, our maximum temperatures, will be a fair few degrees lower.
20:38So it's just something to bear in mind.
20:40And then as we go through the weekend, that more humid air does spread its way further eastward.
20:44So central eastern parts of England, we are going to get the higher humidity pushing through at some point.
20:50It's just on Saturday, it might still feel a little bit more comfortable.
20:53So you may be thinking on Saturday, what's all the fuss about?
20:56Yes, it's hot, but it's quite enjoyable.
20:58Just bear with it, brace yourself, because we do have some higher humidity pushing in as we go through later on in the weekend.
21:07On that note, then, I think now is a good time to talk about what exactly a heat wave is and what the criteria is for it to be declared a heat wave.
21:19And you may have seen this chart before, but it is our threshold map.
21:23And the way it works, for a heat wave, we need to have three consecutive days where the temperature meets or exceeds a certain threshold.
21:32And depending on where you are in the country, depends on what that threshold is.
21:36For many parts, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Northern England, much Wales and Southwest England, that threshold is only 25 degrees.
21:44So you just need 25 or more for three consecutive days for it to be a heat wave in these places.
21:50Get a bit closer, a bit further east, sorry, and the threshold is 26, where we have the kind of pinky reds.
21:56Then the bright reds, the threshold is 27.
21:59And then closer to London and a little bit further north as well, these counties, the threshold is 28.
22:05So you need to have three consecutive days of 28 or more.
22:10And then it's a heat wave.
22:11You may hear some people talk about a mini heat wave.
22:14Now, that's not really a thing.
22:15Either it's a heat wave or it's not.
22:17Either we see temperatures exceed those thresholds for three consecutive days or we don't.
22:22It does look likely that it is going to be a heat wave for a fair few places as we go through this week.
22:28But exactly where?
22:29Well, this chart here shows where we're likely to see our heat wave thresholds being met for those three consecutive days.
22:36On Friday, it's not looking likely in most places, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, three days.
22:44It's not looking likely for most places, but perhaps the far east of Wales, just about reaching that 25, 26 for three consecutive days.
22:53By Saturday, that's when we are likely to see more places in Wales, West Midlands, maybe even Somerset, seeing temperatures of 26 for some 27 Celsius being exceeded.
23:04And that would be the third day by Saturday.
23:06And then by Sunday, because that plume of air will have pushed a little bit further eastwards, perhaps turning a bit fresher across some western parts, but across more central eastern parts of up through England and even into eastern Scotland.
23:18Here we could see those high temperature thresholds being reached for those three consecutive days.
23:24So, like I said, yeah, it is likely to be a heat wave technically for a fair few places.
23:29Exactly when the heat wave is varies depending on where you are in the country.
23:34Then the other thing that I wanted to mention is that our colleagues at UK HSA, they have issued a yellow heat health alert for much of England.
23:44It covers, well, everywhere apart from the northeast and northwest of England, really.
23:48And this is valid from Wednesday all the way until Sunday.
23:52And it's because we do have these high temperatures, temperatures by day in the high 20s, low, possibly mid 30 Celsius.
23:59But it's not just those daytime highs that are going to cause some problems.
24:03It's also the overnight minimum temperatures.
24:06If I just look at these as we go through later this week, and we have some pretty high overnight temperatures, it is going to be oppressive.
24:15It's going to be difficult for sleeping for some places.
24:18In some nights, we're likely to have tropical nights with temperatures staying above 20 Celsius.
24:24So really difficult for sleeping.
24:25Now, when we talk about these heat health alerts being issued, it's worth bearing in mind the majority of people will be OK.
24:32It's going to be hot.
24:33You don't want to do, you know, excessive strenuous work out in the middle of the peak sunshine.
24:39But most people will be fine as long as you, you know, stay hydrated and take sensible precautions.
24:45It's people with underlying health conditions, the elderly, for example, who are more likely to find this hot weather a bit more difficult to cope with.
24:54So if you have any friends, family, neighbours who you think may be a bit more susceptible, make sure you check in on them during this hot spell.
25:02The other thing to factor in, I mentioned the humidity, which is a bit fresher, the lower humidity across central eastern parts for a little while yet.
25:10Even that being said, with the sun blaring down on your house through the day, on Friday, on Saturday, that's going to lead to your house or your home heating up pretty high.
25:23And so even though humidity isn't excessively high for the little while yet, it is still going to lead to some pretty uncomfortable sleeping conditions as we go through into this weekend.
25:36So do be aware.
25:37There are things that you can do to try and alleviate that.
25:40So, you know, curtains close during the daytime to stop the sun blaring through your windows and heating up.
25:46So just be aware that we have some pretty high temperatures coming both by day and by night.
25:51But then one thing that I wanted to show you just about the UK weather was just a little bit of a look back.
25:57We often show these probabilistic pressure charts in our deep dyes, our 10-day trends.
26:01And the thing I wanted to highlight, this was one that I used two weeks ago.
26:06I think it was in the 10-day trend that I did two weeks ago or maybe it was in the 14-day outlook.
26:10I can't quite remember.
26:11But I used it and I wanted to highlight because at the time I remember talking about the fact that there was high pressure set to return.
26:20And we talked about it being this thing called a 10-day ridge, which is when we often see in around 10 days' time this ridge of high pressure developing when we look at the forecast.
26:31But it often gets pushed back and pushed back.
26:33So it's always around 10 days' time.
26:36And that's kind of what we had during the forecast for the week that we're in, just gone really.
26:43Sorry, the week that we had previously, so last week.
26:46In as much as in the run-up to it, around 10 days ahead, there were hints of high pressure returning.
26:51But it got shifted back and back and back and back and back.
26:54But then as we started to look towards the weekend just gone, so around the 13th or 14th of June, there looked to be better agreement and higher confidence that we were going to see this high pressure returning.
27:07And this is what's happened.
27:08We've had this high come back in.
27:11Obviously, we had high pressure through much of spring, but high has returned.
27:14And this was what we were indicating around two weeks ago.
27:18Then, whilst we're at it, I just wanted to show you that there's more high pressure to come as we go through, really, the rest of this week and into next weekend.
27:26And then some more changeable weather, I think, during the early part of next week.
27:30There will be some low pressure systems maybe coming up from the south, maybe coming into the north, maybe a bit of both.
27:35And then hints that towards the end of next week, we could get high pressure returning again, which might be welcome news if you're going to Glastonbury, for example.
27:44And so still a lot to play for exactly with all that.
27:47There probably will be some wet, maybe even thundery weather around for a time next week.
27:52But then we could see things settling down again by the end of next week and into the following weekend.
27:58I think that's everything that I wanted to cover for the UK weather-wise.
28:03But a couple more things before I go.
28:05Tropical Storm Eric.
28:07Now, looking out over the Pacific, the Eastern Pacific, and Tropical Storm Eric is developing and it's heading towards Mexico.
28:15It's likely to strengthen and become a hurricane by, well, around midday on Wednesday local time.
28:22And then push its way north-northwestwards towards southwestern Mexico, then make landfall sometime on Thursday morning.
28:30And this is going to bring some heavy rain, strong winds.
28:33If I, let's have a quick look and see what it's looking like in our graphics.
28:38And let's head towards Mexico.
28:39And if I just play that through and you can see here it is, there's some very wet weather.
28:44There's also some wet weather the other side of Mexico as well.
28:49It's sort of linked, but it's a different feature.
28:51But you can see the feature that's currently Tropical Storm Eric going to become Hurricane, or expected to become Hurricane Eric, making its way up towards Mexico.
29:01And, yes, like I say, it's likely to make landfall around Thursday.
29:05And it's going to bring heavy rain, strong winds, large storm surge, that kind of thing, going to cause some problems there.
29:10Then, we've talked about it already, but this coming weekend is the summer solstice.
29:19If you go by the astronomical calendar, it means the start of summer.
29:23Obviously, I'm a meteorologist, so summer started on the 1st of June for me.
29:26But, yes, this coming Saturday is the summer solstice.
29:29It's when the tilt of the Earth makes the north point closest towards the sun.
29:37And it gives us, in the northern hemisphere, our longest day of the year.
29:41But one thing that I always find interesting when it comes to our sunrise and our sunset times is that they aren't quite even in the way that they act around the solstice.
29:50Now, if you watched my deep dive around six months ago, you'll have heard me talk about this when it was around the winter solstice.
29:57But I thought it was worth mentioning anyway.
29:59Let's look at our sunrise times as we go through June.
30:02I've picked Leeds as somewhere relatively central in the UK.
30:04And you can see through the beginning of June, our sunrise times were still getting earlier and earlier and earlier.
30:11However, it was around the, was it the 14th when they stopped getting earlier.
30:18So for the last couple of days and through all this week, sunrise has stayed at around 0434.
30:24And even though the solstice is this Saturday on the 21st, the sunrise time is actually a little bit later than it is in the preceding few days, which is a little bit in contrast to what you might think.
30:40The flip of this, if we look at our sunset times, and yes, they're getting later and later and later and later and later, all the way through past the solstice.
30:49And it's not really until, yeah, just after the solstice, really, when our sunset times stop getting later.
30:55And it's not until the, what, the 28th that they start getting that little bit earlier.
31:01So even though the solstice is the longest day of the year, it's not the day with the earliest sunrise, nor is it the day with the latest sunset.
31:11They happen before or after the solstice, respectively.
31:15Why is this?
31:15Well, it's a bit tricky, but it's all due to the tilt of the Earth.
31:19Remember, the Earth's tilted on its axis, and the fact that the orbit that the Earth takes around the sun isn't circular.
31:28It's slightly elliptical.
31:29And because of that, the speed at which the Earth is going varies depending on the time of year.
31:37Around the equinoxes, it's going slower.
31:40Around the solstices, it's going that little bit faster as it gets closer to the sun.
31:44And because of that, the time that the Earth, or time that it takes for the solar day, so from solar noon to solar noon, when the sun's at its highest point in the sky, that's actually a little bit more than 24 hours.
32:00And because of that, it leads to this slight change in sunset, sunrise times compared to what you might actually think.
32:10A little interesting thing along this side of things, well, at least I find it interesting anyway, is we think of our day being 24 hours, and it's the time that it takes for the Earth to spin once.
32:23But it's that 24 hours, it's the time that it takes for the Earth to spin once in relation to our sun.
32:29Because it's our closest star, it's the one that dominates our weather.
32:33Well, it's the big one.
32:34It's the important one from our point of view.
32:36But actually, because it's orbiting the sun, the 24 hours isn't the length of time that it takes for the Earth to spin on its axis.
32:45It's actually closer to around, I think it's 23 hours, 56 minutes or something.
32:50So if you were looking in relation to other stars in space, that's how long it would take for those stars to appear in the same place in the sky.
32:58And it's all because of the fact that we're orbiting around the sun.
33:02And so, you know, our position in relation to the sun changes depending on where we are in the orbit.
33:08I'm not sure if that made much sense, but at least just if you take nothing else away from this, it's the summer solstice on Sunday, the longest day of the year.
33:17And so from then on, our days will start to get shorter.
33:20But we still have a long summer ahead of us and we have some pretty high temperatures to watch out for this weekend as well.
33:26Part of the reason why they're going to be so high on Saturday and Sunday is because of how close to the solstice we are.
33:32As I spoke to Matthew Lennart about we have so much daylight, so much sun that we have those ingredients for things to heat up so high.
33:41Thank you for joining me for this week's Deep Dive.
33:45It has been a blast.
33:46Whatever you're up to with the hot weather, do make sure you stay safe.
33:50As I said at the start, make sure you hit the like button.
33:52It's been a great Deep Dive.
33:53You want to hit the like button.
33:55Do leave some comments.
33:57I'll be back with the Weather Studio Live on Friday.
34:00I'll be here with Aidan and we'll be answering any questions you have from this Deep Dive.
34:04So please do get them in.
34:06Make sure you share this with anyone who you think might be interested in it.
34:09And always subscribe.
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34:25So why not hit me a follow if you fancy it?
34:28And yeah, just make sure that you stay up to date with the forecast because things are likely to change.
34:33We'll firm up on the detail for how hot it's going to get through this weekend.
34:38Alex Deacon will have the 10-day trend tomorrow.
34:41That will be one that's worth catching.
34:43And also, hopefully tomorrow, I think we'll be issuing the latest edition of Climate Conversations,
34:49where I'll be chatting to one of our climate scientists about some extreme heat
34:54and the chances of seeing it again in the UK.
34:57Thank you so much for watching.
34:58I'll see you again soon.
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