How we talk about the weather / How can we talk about summer?

Note: This is not a word-for-word transcript.

Hello, I'm Elizabeth. I'm a weather presenter at the BBC and I love summer. Beaches, long days, short nights, ice cream. It's a fantastic time of year.

I'm Ben. I'm a meteorologist and weather presenter at the BBC, and I hate summer. I find it too hot, too hot to work, too hot to sleep, too hot to go on the train. I really don't like those high temperatures.

Summer is at different times in different parts of the world. It's around the summer solstice - in June in the northern hemisphere and in December in the southern hemisphere. The days are long, the nights are short and that's partly why I love it.

But it can feel too hot, especially at nights and especially in cities. There's something called the heat island effect, where cities are hotter than the surrounding countryside and that can make it difficult to sleep. Now, it's not only about the actual temperature. There's another thing called humidity, a measure of how much moisture there is in the air, and that can have a big impact on just how hot it feels.

But when it does get too hot, a lot of people go to the beach. That's because towards the coast you get a sea breeze when the wind comes in from the sea, and it feels cooler. If you are going to the beach though, don't forget to check the UV index. That's an indication of how strong the sun is for your skin.

If we get many hot days in a row, we call that a heatwave. Now in the UK that's defined as three days or more of temperatures above a certain level. It varies depending on where you are between 25 and 28 degrees. That level will be different in different countries around the world. If it stays too dry for too long, we can have problems like droughts and also wildfires. But summer can also bring heavy rain. We can have thunderstorms and flash flooding, which is where somewhere floods very quickly.

We've talked about summer and what we think of it, but how might summers be changing?

Well, here in the UK, the five hottest summers on record have all occurred since the year 2000. And during summer all around the world, we are regularly seeing records being broken.

So, summers are getting hotter and for some, drier too. But when we do see rain, it could be very intense and that again could lead to flash flooding.