Daniel Austin

[Daniel Austin @DessyMessi]

Great photo but I’d like to ask you to take more photos of weather stations wherever you go round the country and how you access them on public or private land? Many of these stations come up frequently in weather reports but we could do with a few photos to help create an album of weather stations.

[Daniel Austin @DessyMessi]

@metoffice I love the explanation about the differences between this heatwave and the end of June heatwave. It is a long video but very rewarding.

[Marx de Morais @MarxdeMorais]

Andy Burnham's proposal for a Northern No 10 should serve as a warning, not an inspiration. Germany's experiment of splitting the government between Bonn and Berlin cost the equivalent of £9 billion, then saddled taxpayers with years of duplication and inefficiency. Politicians and civil servants shuttling between two capitals, duplicate offices, and, as we all know, not exactly on the cheap: first class, chauffeured cars, flights, helicopters and hotels, all at the taxpayer's expense. Hardly a model Britain should copy.

Of course the North deserves investment. But just importing a slice of London is neither respect nor value for money. Let's instead build on the North's own identity: reindustrialisation, world-leading manufacturing, science, arts, culture and transport. Create cities that stand proudly on their own, not miniature versions of London.

What do you think is the right future for the North?

[Aaron Newbury @AJNewbury94]

I have to admit, Burnham's speech comes off as a bit naïve. To be blunt, it smacks of a man who's grown extremely used to not having much scrutiny and to being the centre of local power and attention for nearly a decade.

Him not taking questions at the end is just as telling. Burnham will effectively become Prime Minister by default: no contest inside his own party, no general election mandate for the changes he wants, and of course no scrutiny from the press.

His entire speech was, in effect, "why can't everyone be more like me" and yet it announced almost nothing. Nothing on cost, nothing on how any of it actually gets done. Just a collection of soundbites, and painfully political ones at that, with no substance behind them.

"A circuit-breaker." "Good growth in every postcode." All of it sounds lovely (let's do the good things and not the bad ones). Nobody's ever thought of that before!! But… how?

Being a Mayor is a fundamentally different job to being Prime Minister. A Mayor spends money, much of it handed to him by central government, and never has to weigh one department's misery against another's. The job he's warming himself up for is the one that has to make those trade-offs, and nothing today suggested he's reckoned with that.

He reaches, as these people always do, towards the idea of a country "lifted back up", homes built, places regenerated, industry revived, pride in place, etc etc. There are models for this. You can run massive public housing programmes, but historically they're delivered through expensive, highly centralised, government-run schemes. Singapore being the obvious example. What they are not delivered by is building a second centre of government.

What Burnham is really offering is top-down socialism with a smile. Devolution on steroids doesn't shrink the state, it bloats it. A "No.10 North" doesn't move power closer to people, it just builds more state, in a second place, at additional cost. It's more process, dressed up as a radical idea nobody's ever had before.

More and more, political speeches are just a hodge-podge of pleasant noise. We will do things, lots of things, good things. We'll make sure things you like have "social value", we'll make you proud of [insert thing to be proud of], we'll deliver [insert policy that sounds really nice].

But the problems this country faces are enormous. Law and order is eroding, and rebuilding it means serious money for police, courts and prisons. The state grows more expensive by the year while the workforce paying for it keeps shrinking. We have an energy crisis and a poverty crisis, conflicts multiplying abroad and armed forces begging for cash, and more than a million young people out of work - on top of housing nobody can afford, child poverty, and a generation that feels detached from the society around it.

You don't fix any of that with a slogan and a second postcode for the guy in charge.

Every Mayor thinks his city is the best, and Mayors, almost uniquely in British politics, are rarely questioned. Today we all saw what nearly a decade of that does to a man. And thanks to his refusal to so much as take a question, we've had no chance to hold a single one of his plans up to the light.

[Daniel Austin @DessyMessi]

@MrsCaptainScott @metoffice And where you expect there to be a weather station like St Andrews, a big tourist centre and golf destination there is nothing.

[Daniel Austin @DessyMessi]

@MrsCaptainScott @mb018538 @metoffice So many weather stations are a big secret. Heathrow, Northolt airport even the Met Office at Exeter. I would like to see visual proof that these stations exist.

[Daniel Austin @DessyMessi]

@metoffice Why isn’t East Anglia under the red warning of extreme heat? That’s where today’s highest temperatures are being recorded.

[Daniel Austin @DessyMessi]

I think it’s time you provided evidence that the weather monitoring station at Heathrow exists. Nobody has ever seen a picture of it and no one knows its location. For example if I should wish to view it, who do I write to gain access and permission to take a photo? Same with Northolt airport and Exeter Met Office. It will help prove the sceptics wrong.

[Allison Pearson @AllisonPearson]

Prediction.
There will never be another Labour government.
This sorry, incompetent bunch of numpties are the last.
No idea how to run an economy, provide affordable energy or a functioning health service, defend our borders, deport our enemies.
What is the point of them?

[Daniel Austin @DessyMessi]

@JamesMelville Unfortunately it doesn’t appear to have a weather station. I looked in the Botanical Gardens and on the university website. I just feel for a place as important as this there should be a proper weather station.

[Daniel Austin @DessyMessi]

@gryn_a Hepatica nobilis or liverwort in the buttercup family, Ranunculaceae.

[Daniel Austin @DessyMessi]

@hammondweather Beautiful. More of these in the coming months please.

[Daniel Austin @DessyMessi]

@MetRyan96 I’ve never known a high pressure over Northern Europe to have such a feeble effect. But the cold air was extremely limited to Scandinavia, Baltic states and Poland. Occasionally Germany and NL but never extending westwards.

[Daniel Austin @DessyMessi]

@severeweatherEU I must say I cannot recall a winter high pressure over Northern Europe propelling so little cold air westward. 40 years ago the Atlantic air would have been kept well and truly out. The cold air seems to be in such a narrow area south and western Europe seems totally unaffected.

[Daniel Austin @DessyMessi]

@lordmiles Also censuses today are not concerned with population figures, ethnicity and growth; that would have been deemed unacceptable. They are more about finding out about employment and raising tax for the government.

[Daniel Austin @DessyMessi]

@robin_j_brooks What’s your forecast for gold this year?

[Daniel Austin @DessyMessi]

I’m enjoying your 10 day forecasts. Jet stream charts are very informative and I’d like to see more of them and how it influences direction of weather systems. Only change I’d make is shorten the video by skirting over the first two or three days which are covered in your other forecasts.

[Daniel Austin @DessyMessi]

@Met4CastUK Is that stratocumulus over us?

[Daniel Austin @DessyMessi]

@SarahAllisonFl The first thing her government should do is take away Greta Thunberg’s passport from her.