Those planning bank holiday barbecues may want to think again about their weekend plans, forecasters have warned.
While the mercury may hit 26C in the UK on Monday as hot weather returns for a brief spell, the temperature is expected to drop several degrees ahead of the three-day August break.
The Met Office’s Bonnie Diamond told HuffPost UK the start of the week will be a lot warmer and more settled than the latter half, when temperatures are likely to be in the late teens or early 20s at most.
She expected a high of 25-26C on Monday, with “some patchy light rain”, before temperatures would cool slightly on Tuesday to the low-to-mid-20s.
Rain is expected across much of the country on Wednesday, making its way from Scotland to London, but Diamond said temperatures could still reach highs of 26-27C.
But by Thursday and Friday, the forecaster said, “the whole country will feel much cooler” than it did at the start of the week.
She added that the weekend would be similar, with spells of both sunshine and rain as the weather becomes more unsettled. Highs of 16-20C are expected in the south and east.
Those highs and conditions are expected to remain until Monday, which will also be “cooler”, with the risk of rain.
The forecasts come after Storm Ernesto battered parts of Britain over the weekend and as the Met Office on Sunday predicted that Summer 2018 may yet be named the warmest on record in the UK.
The mean temperature for this summer so far is 16.1C – exactly the same as it was at this point during the record-breaking summer of 2006.