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Thunderstorms have continued to affect parts of East Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, East Anglia and the Southeast of England this afternoon, following yesterday's heat.

Temperatures across Yorkshire and Lincolnshire on Monday reached 32C (90F) for the first time since July 2006.

Both Robin Hood airport (the old Finningley RAF base) in South Yorkshire and Humberside airport reached their peaks shortly after lunchtime before cloud moved in from the Southwest, as did Leconfield in East Yorkshire and Waddington in Lincolnshire.

The temperature levels were amongst the highest in the country, beaten only by Gravesend in Kent, where 33C (91F) was recorded.

Today, Leconfield has managed only 17C (63F) - a 15C drop compared with yesterday.

Today's rainfall is adding to what has already been a wet month across many areas. At Coningsby in drought-order hit Lincolnshire, up to and including today, 76mm of rain has been recorded, compared with the average of 54mm.

More rain is needed, but June's rainfall has provided some short term relief following the exceptionally dry spring.

News from scientists in America claiming that the sun is about to enter a prolonged quiet period in its history has this week.

Whether this particular prediction comes true remains to be seen, as some scientists, including those at NASA, have consistently been proved wrong with their solar cycle forecasts in the last few years

But we should be under no illusions that if the sun does continue to be weaker than normal over a prolonged period of time, and it enters a so called 'Maunder minimum', then we could have to re-think what 'normal' weather means for the British Isles in the coming decades.

The idea that the sun has not been behaving as it should will come as no surprise to readers of this blog; nor will the concept that variations in the behaviour of the sun could affect our weather.

Although some mainstream scientists and meteorologists seem to have been reluctant to accept that this is the case, there is now a growing realisation that the sun could play a crucial role in our weather, in large part through the way it impacts the position of the jet stream, although the mechanism of how this happens is not properly understood.

David Archibald, an Australian scientist, predicted over two years ago that we were about to enter a 'Dalton minimum'; a period of low solar activity in the early 1800's which led to much colder winters across the UK.

The Maunder Minimum of 1650-1715, a much longer period of low solar activity, coincided with severe winters, leading some climatologists to call it 'The Little Ice Age'.

Professor Lockwood, a respected mainstream scientist from Reading University carried out similar research a year later and reached broadly the same conclusions as David Archibald as to what this could mean for the UK's climate.

The implications for our weather in this research are clear. The jet stream on average could be further south than would normally be the case. This ribbon of strong winds high up in the atmosphere marks the boundary between cold air to the north and warm air to the south, and is where most rain bearing weather systems across the UK form.

In winter, the UK would be much more vulnerable to cold air from the north & east. Summers could be cooler and unsettled. In fact the winters and summers we have experienced in the last few years could become the norm.

Professor Lockwood pointed out in more recent research that it could also mean that on average there would be less wind, especially in winter with more areas of high pressure - with direct implications for energy security because of the huge expansion of wind farms the UK will witness in the next few years.

The impact on the global climate is much less clear.

Prof Lockwood pointed out that winters in the UK may continue to be much colder on average, but the action of a weak sun has been to disrupt the earth's climate and re-distribute the planet's heat - in fact the last two winters have seen areas of the globe like Northern Canada and Alaska seeing exceptional winter warmth.

A study last year in Geophysical Research Letters did however find that should we enter a prolonged period of low solar activity in the coming decades, global temperatures could be lower by 0.3C by the end of the century, compared to normal solar activity - but that this would be dwarfed by warming due to man-made greenhouse gases. This thinking is backed by most mainstream scientists.

But some scientists disagree, and argue that such an event could significantly cool the planet. In a fascinating paper I wrote about over a year ago, and which you can read again , Russian Scientist Dr Abdussamatov predicted in 2009 that the sun has a bi-centennial cycle, and will fall to a very low level of activity in the coming years. He concluded, contrary to the research published in Geophysical Research Letters, that warming due to man made greenhouse gases will be dwarfed by this 'solar cooling'.

This is a fascinating time for climate science and meteorology and there's the potential for far reaching consequences.

For example, , which currently show higher rainfall in winter by 2050 based on higher greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would almost certainly be wrong should we enter a 'Maunder Minimum'.

More money needs to be made available for extensive research into the link between the sun and our weather and climate.

Follow me on twitter @Hudsonweather

Sunday saw the heaviest rainfall of the year across parts of Lincolnshire, only 48 hours on from the drought order issued by the Environment Agency for parts of Eastern England.

14.4mm of rain was recorded at Coningsby yesterday. This brings the total since Friday to 28mm of rain, more than half the monthly average rainfall of 54mm.

Across Yorkshire, Leconfield in the east of the county did even better, with 17.6mm recorded on Sunday, almost the same as Bingley in West Yorkshire, with 17.8mm.

Other drought hit areas measured useful rainfall too, with 9.4mm at Wattisham in Suffolk, and 8.4mm at Wittering in Cambridgeshire.

There is no doubt that parts of Eastern England are in drought, whether this is measured by rainfall deficit, or soil moisture deficit, and more will be needed over the coming weeks and possibly months to resolve the situation.

Yet the timing of the drought order was surprising, given the increasingly clear signal last week from all the main forecasting centres that rainfall totals looked set to increase sharply for the rest of the month compared with what was observed in Spring.

Low pressure is expected to dominate the UK's weather through June, with showers or longer spells of rain, some of which will be heavy. It won't rain every day, but stringing 3 or 4 dry days together this month will be difficult to achieve.

Those who lived through the drought of 1976 will remember that within days of the government appointing Dennis Howell as the Minister for Drought, the heavens opened, indeed September that year turned out to be one of the wettest on record.

It will be interesting to see if the expected rainfall this month will make the drought order issued on Friday as short lived as Mr Howell's then new ministry of drought was back in 1976.

June's weather looks set to deteriorate further as low pressure intensifies its grip across the UK.

The timing couldn't be more awkward for the Environment Agency who this morning issued a drought order for parts of Eastern England.

Only hours later, the Met Office issued yellow warnings in parts of the country, including drought-order hit Lincolnshire, for prolonged thundery downpours that could produce 25-45mm in places, with the associated risk of localised flooding.

Just as the atmosphere was 'blocked' through March and April, with persistent areas of high pressure that led to the dry conditions, the atmosphere looks set to stay stuck in a rut of persistent areas of low pressure, possibly for much of the rest of June.

On Sunday a deep area of low pressure will bring rain sweeping across the UK, including drought-hit Eastern England. A respite will follow into next week with a little ridge of high pressure, before another area of low pressure swings back in from the west bringing more rain to many areas later in the week.

It's an all too familiar pattern of weather for the British Isles at this time of the year, especially after a long period of dry weather, which only a cursory glance at the climate books shows.

It also highlights once more the dangers of long range forecasting.

We all remember the blaze of headlines at the end of May that this summer was likely to be as hot and sunny as the summer of 1976 - arguably the best and most memorable summer of the 20th century - leaving expectations across the country sky high that at long last we might be in for a barbeque summer.

These headlines came from a detailed forecast from private weather company Netweather.

They said only last month that 'Within the summer, we expect the core of the hot and settled weather to occur during June and July, particularly June which we think will be very pleasant with high pressure in charge across much of western Europe and the UK.'

Rarely has a long range forecast gone so spectacularly wrong, so quickly.

The Met Office is still haunted by their now infamous 'barbecue summer' forecast of 2009.

Netweather will be hoping that July and August shows a rapid and sharp improvement - or more likely that their 'shades of 1976' forecast is quietly forgotten.

The global temperature according to the UAH satellite measure was +0.13C above the 30 year running mean in May, showing virtually no change from April's anomaly.

Global temperatures are slowly recovering as La Nina fades in the Pacific, but remain much cooler compared with May last year, when the UAH anomaly was +0.46C above the 30 year running mean, which was of course shortly after El Nino's peak.

Global temperatures are rising at a rate of 0.14C/decade based on this satellite data.

Converted to the more standard reference point that the Met Office and World Meteorological Organisation use (with reference to the 1961-1990 average) the May 2011 anomaly would equate to approximately +0.37C above the 1961-1990 mean global temperature.

Provisional figures released by the Met Office show that Spring 2011 (March 1st to May 31st inclusive) with a mean temperature 10.2C was the equal warmest in the Central England Temperature series which dates back to 1659.

Only Spring 1893 was as warm as Spring 2011. Spring 2007 with a mean temperature of 10.1C is now 3rd warmest on record.

According to the England and Wales rainfall series, dating back to 1766, Spring 2011 was the 3rd driest since these records began, and the driest since 1893.

Across the UK as a whole, 185mm of rain was recorded, which is 80% of the 1971-2000 average. This masked sharp regional variations, with some eastern parts of England recording less than a third of normal rainfall.

Locally, Leeming in North Yorkshire also set new records.

It was the driest Spring on record with 37.8mm, beating the previous record of 46.8mm set in 1990.

It was also the sunniest Spring on record with 552.4hrs, beating the previous record of 544.1hrs set in 1948.

2011 was also the joint warmest on record with 9.7C, matching the previous record set in 1945.

Leeming's figures go back to 1945.

March and April in particular were dominated by persistent areas of high pressure which led to the dry and warm conditions. But early indications suggest that the the foreseeable future is likely to be unsettled across the UK as a whole, and dominated by low pressure with West or Southwesterly winds - climatologically normal for the UK - with no sign of the long hot summer widely talked about in the press.