Today brings us the London Marathon. As luck would have it, the conditions aren't the best, with a rather wet and windy start to the race. Through the morning, the rain will quickly clear, but heavy showers are set to follow hot on the heels of the main rainband, so any dry or bright weather will not be long lived!

Talking of rain, Perpignon in southern France has had a rather wet day or two. In 24 hours, continuous heavy rain totted up to 129mm in total, which is more than two and a half times the 48mm average for the whole of April!

Salto, on the border of Argentina and Uraguay, has also had a wet few days. 87mm of rain fell here in 24 hours, which is a significant proportion of the 130mm monthly average.

There has been, however, a fair amount of pleasant weather around too. Up until yesterday, the southeast of England had been enjoying a warm, sunny few days, as has Stockholm in Sweden. Temperatures yesterday afternoon reached 17.6 Celsius, more than a whopping 10 Celsius above the usual 7.2 Celsius for April. In fact, this more closely resembled an average June temperature, so it was a lovely start to the weekend here.

Staying on the warm theme, St Louis in Mississippi had a very warm night on Friday night into Saturday morning. The temperatures dropped overnight to a balmy 18.3 Celsius, more than 11 degrees above the norm of just 6.7 Celsius. To put that into context, that is warmer than the top daytime temperature in the UK yesterday!

Tehran, the capital of Iran, is usually enjoying the first signs of the long hot summer to come at this stage of the year. Maximum temperatures usually reach around 21 or 22 Celsius. However, yesterday, the mercury barely scraped to 7 Celsius, so it was rather chilly by local standards!

So, back to the UK, with all the wind, rain, and showers around, it was feeling really quite cold outside, with not much improvement likely through the day. But on the plus side, for those brave marathon runners, at least the cool weather is slightly more preferred to the warm sunshine of last year. Good luck everyone!

Weather News from the last five days:
17/04/2004
16/04/2004
15/04/2004
14/04/2004
13/04/2004

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