Weather warning issued ahead of more heavy rain

An area of low pressure is set to bring more rain to most of England for Thursday and Thursday night.

Met Office yellow rain warnings have been issued for southern England and are valid between 09:00 and 22:00. Widely 20-30mm of rain is expected with some areas seeing as much as 50mm.

The rain will fall on saturated ground following recent wet weather, bringing with it a risk of some localised flooding.

Driving conditions could become quite poor with surface water covering some roads. The rain will be accompanied by some quite strong winds in the far southeast with coastal gusts over 50mph.

January has already got off to quite a wet start in southern England. Northolt in west London has recorded 44mm of rainfall which is already 70% of the January average - despite it not being half-way through the month yet.

The Midlands and eastern England will also turn wet with 10-20mm of rain falling widely. The ground is not as saturated in these areas so flooding isn't expected, but surface water and spray will affect some faster roads.

The rest of the month will have low pressure to the west of the UK and high pressure to the north-east. It will be quite wet at times in southern and western areas, so there could be a few more localised flooding issues yet to come this month.

The weather will often be rather cloudy and there could be some colder incursions of air getting into the north-east of the UK threatening some snow.

This along, with the cold snap we saw at the start of the month, means that January may turn out to be a colder month than average, something that we see much less often as our climate continues to warm.