What a shame for the farmers who have been hay making al day since the early hours- everything got absolutely soaked with very heavy rain for 20 mins - and now perfect blue skies with a lovely sunset! Let's hope they get a good day tomorrow or the hay will go rotten.

Yay! I've actually got a fan going to help keep me cool. 22.8 outside already and even my humidity guage is happy at 66%.

But it's only over there. Here haydays are on!

And the cherry crop looks like an almost complete waste this year

What about apricots?

Hot and sunny again today, but quite humid.

Really? Looking okay here from what I've seen travelling around, but just not enough sunshine to ripen up yet.

It's not bad for cherries around THE LAKE. Looks ok albeit a bit later this year.
Apricots are still to come.

Very dark to the south east (We're on the west side of Winterthur). Thunder and lightning. Husband is in the cellar with the dog, but I can hear her bark now and then. Too hot for her thunder shirt though - it's like a sweat shirt.

Just before this started, the light outside was that weird yellow pre thunderstorm thing.


Fun night ahead, no doubt.

The 'Gods' are not happy.

I got alerts on my phone about a "heavy thunderstorm" heading in the direction of Lausanne (and I was, unfortunately, on my way back from somewhere else). Eventually, the rumblings and lightnings started around 2115 and mainly seems to be over Lutry/Vevey. For the information of everyone in the region: the meteosuisse has been predicting Level 3 thunderstorms from 1300 today until 1800 on Sunday (and level 4 floods, apart from thunderstorms, in Amriswil, St Gallen, and Steckborn).

edot, coming to think of it, there was that strange diffused light phenomenon here too. Never associated it with thunderstorms.
There does seem to be a lengthy band of lightnings traversing Switzerland:

Thunderbolt and lightning, very very frightening.

The weird light thing is often a predictor of thunderstorms. i've never lived in a high risk tornado area, but I understand it's very common there too.

We're having lots of rumbling here.

Do you have a link for this source of lightning strikes?
Apologies if you posted this link before

I have before, but here you go The delay is around 5 secs and it also shows the number of lightning strikes per region zoomed:

https://www.lightningmaps.org/?lang=...=0;o=0;b=;n=0;

Warning: it is very very addictive!

That's interesting, the sky was a bit weird looking when I put the rubbish out at about 10pm.
It was lovely but a strange colour and with weird cloud formations.
We had the most amazing thunderstorm during the night ( it must have been loud to have woken me up) despite there being nothing predicted in our area either on my weather app or on the map posted above.

Lovely warm evening yesterday- were woken up at around 2am by the whole place being alight and very high winds. No fork lightening, no up in the sky electrical clouds- the whole valley was flashing with light, no rumbles of thunder- it went on for about 1 hours- never seen anything like it ever!

I didn't take this photo, but this almost captures the hue:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_N4EN978F95...low+clouds.JPG
as though I was seeing through a sepia filter!

The map shows real-time lightnings and the strikes are deleted after 15/30 minutes or so.

Based on yesterday's weather changes, I reckon that the most reliable forecasts are by MeteoSuisse and their weather app (+/- 4 hours).

Loads of lightning and thunder here last night. We lost power several times, the longest being for 5 hours. There was a fair amount of rain, but no hail which is what I usually expect with such a storm. It was very difficult to sleep!

Here is another great site for tracking lightning:
http://en.blitzortung.org/live_lightning_maps.php


Last night (midnight) there was lightning flashing almost like a strobe light, it was so frequent. As there was a layer of clouds between me and the lightning, so the light was diffused - very strange. No thunder - that came an hour later, along with an intense rainfall.

My son: sleeps through the lightning hitting directly our house - is awoken by creaking od the floor panels an hour later... Sigh

The storm was wonderful!

Distant lightning storm

It's worth mentioning that they also simulate thunder propagation through the area around the lightning strike. Useful to predict the distance to the storm