Crepuscular Ray

There are a few buildings similar to that not too far away from the area, but the leaves look as if they've only just emerged in spring and don't look like they're being blown around in the wind. Where's the rain? It was chucking it down at the time: those leaves look as if they're in sunlight. And why no photographer's credit.

Did anyone else see Piers Corbyn on Newsnight last night? He appeared to be claiming that he'd predicted that a tornado would strike somewhere in Britain yesterday. Did he? He wouldn't pass on his long-term forecast on the grounds that other people who'd already paid for it would have every right to be upset if he passed it on for free. What was the Beeb doing giving him the publicity and credibility?

Sorry Paul, but it's a real bugbear of mine. Kensal Rise is not Harlesden! The Beeb make the same mistake - anything that happens between Paddington and Wembley normally gets ascribed to Harlesden, especially if it's criminal.

It was about half a mile from me (yikes), about 10 minutes into a thunder shower. It went very, very dark, very quickly. The wind sounded similar to the storm of 1987, a loud, steady roar that lasted for about a minute, not at all like a downdraft. I didn't imagine it was anything that serious, though. Wish I'd thought to look out of the window.

Hi Viking - as an Orange customer you have my every sympathy about broadband provision (or lack of it). Given that TS Durian's massive rainfall has been causing severe mudflow and flooding problems to villages on the lower slopes of Mahon in the Philippines, are there any worries about whether this will cause any instabilities higher up the mountain and so reduce pressure and increase the risk of eruptions? Looks like you and your colleagues are going to have a very busy weekend - best of luck. CR

Sorry, don't have that much problem with the various shades of green. As far as I'm concerned, it's better than the Beeb's cat-with-a-liver-probem brown. The increased number of observation sites is great and the introduction of the last 24 hours of satellite images rather than being able to see only the most recent ones is great for checking the progress of fronts, etc. However, I do have a technical problem: the satellite maps, for example, don't load when using Explorer with OSX and mean I have to resort to Apple's yukky - and incredibly slow - Safari. Grrrr.

Thanks Viking.

Cheers Viking. Nice to see it at a different, more informative, angle than from the volcano webcam from Johnston Ridge. What happened to the massive slab that was projecting at one side of the new mound at a near vertical angle earlier in the year? I forgot to look for a few weeks and it disappeared from mention on the web. CR

They've done the casual look on Countryfile since the summer, as if their taking their jackets off makes a forecast more relevant to 'countryfolk' (or perhaps the media types in television centre think it does). At least it's not as bad as Breakfast: did anyone else spot Matt Taylor in waders up to his chest in a pond full of floating cranberries at Kew Gardens earlier in the autumn. What a waste of licence fee

SpaceWeather.com are now getting rather excited about this particular region's imminent emergence over the Sun's limb. Given that the new sunspot cycle seems to be sluggish and rather reluctant to get into gear, any activity seems welcome. Although the British Isles are badly placed for seeing aurorae because the geomagnetic north pole is somewhere in Canada(and getting farther southwest each year) rather than in the same place as the geographic north pole, anything that promises really big X-class solar flares, especially if the Sun's magnetic field is oriented to the south (again see SpaceWeather.com for updates) might be promising at this time of year. But don't count on it.

Hopefully the region responsible will remain as active once it gets round to this side of the Sun.

Not sad at all: it's beautiful - on a par with Mt Fuji, I think.

Plinies - think they were uncle and nephew....

Yes, that's the one Blitzen. Thanks.

In my rented flat in nw London we only lost power for about 10 hours and the wall at the bottom of the garden (which took Brent Council 6 months to replace, naturally), but my parents in East Sussex were without power for about 3 days (even though they had underground power cables) and lost loads of trees, especially evergreens. What was truly depressing was when my boss had to call someone we were working with at Kew, and he just cried down the phone for about quarter of an hour because they'd lost so much. What I remember better, because it happened during daytime, was the late January 1990 (?) storm in the southeast. Oxford Street was an amazing sight, with hoardings and bits of shop signs sailing along about 30 feet in the air and just smacking through plate glass windows. Not a good day to go shoe-shopping!

Congratulations on getting your coastguard qualifications, Viking. Well deserved. A friend visited Monserrat a few weeks ago as part of a conservation project - even though Souffriere Hills is not now classified as dangerous, he and his colleagues were still very impressed by the near daily 'minor' eruptions and ash-falls, which still get pretty near to the inhabitable parts of the island when the wind is in the right (or perhaps wrong) direction.

Oct. 19, 2006 Erica Hupp/Dwayne Brown Headquarters, Washington 202-358-1237/1726 Anatta NOAA, Earth System Research Laboratory, Boulder, Colo. 303-497-6288 RELEASE: 06-338 NASA AND NOAA ANNOUNCE ANTARCTIC OZONE HOLE IS A RECORD BREAKER NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists report this year's ozone hole in the polar region of the Southern Hemisphere has broken records for area and depth. The ozone layer acts to protect life on Earth by blocking harmful ultraviolet rays from the sun. The "ozone hole" is a severe depletion of the ozone layer high above Antarctica. It is primarily caused by human-produced compounds that release chlorine and bromine gases in the stratosphere. "From September 21 to 30, the average area of the ozone hole was the largest ever observed, at 10.6 million square miles," said Paul Newman, atmospheric scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. If the stratospheric weather conditions had been normal, the ozone hole would be expected to reach a size of about 8.9 to 9.3 million square miles, about the surface area of North America. The Ozone Monitoring Instrument on NASA's Aura satellite measures the total amount of ozone from the ground to the upper atmosphere over the entire Antarctic continent. This instrument observed a low value of 85 Dobson Units (DU) on Oct. 8, in a region over the East Antarctic ice sheet. Dobson Units are a measure of ozone amounts above a fixed point in the atmosphere. The Ozone Monitoring Instrument was developed by the Netherlands' Agency for Aerospace Programs, Delft, The Netherlands, and the Finnish Meteorological Institute, Helsinki, Finland. Scientists from NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., use balloon-borne instruments to measure ozone directly over the South Pole. By Oct. 9, the total column ozone had plunged to 93 DU from approximately 300 DU in mid-July. More importantly, nearly all of the ozone in the layer between eight and 13 miles above the Earth's surface had been destroyed. In this critical layer, the instrument measured a record low of only 1.2 DU., having rapidly plunged from an average non-hole reading of 125 DU in July and August. "These numbers mean the ozone is virtually gone in this layer of the atmosphere," said David Hofmann, director of the Global Monitoring Division at the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory. "The depleted layer has an unusual vertical extent this year, so it appears that the 2006 ozone hole will go down as a record-setter." Observations by Aura's Microwave Limb Sounder show extremely high levels of ozone destroying chlorine chemicals in the lower stratosphere (approximately 12.4 miles high). These high chlorine values covered the entire Antarctic region in mid to late September. The high chlorine levels were accompanied by extremely low values of ozone. The temperature of the Antarctic stratosphere causes the severity of the ozone hole to vary from year to year. Colder than average temperatures result in larger and deeper ozone holes, while warmer temperatures lead to smaller ones. The NOAA National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) provided analyses of satellite and balloon stratospheric temperature observations. The temperature readings from NOAA satellites and balloons during late-September 2006 showed the lower stratosphere at the rim of Antarctica was approximately nine degrees Fahrenheit colder than average, increasing the size of this year's ozone hole by 1.2 to 1.5 million square miles. The Antarctic stratosphere warms by the return of sunlight at the end of the polar winter and by large-scale weather systems (planetary-scale waves) that form in the troposphere and move upward into the stratosphere. During the 2006 Antarctic winter and spring, these planetary-scale wave systems were relatively weak, causing the stratosphere to be colder than average. As a result of the Montreal Protocol and its amendments, the concentrations of ozone-depleting substances in the lower atmosphere (troposphere) peaked around 1995 and are decreasing in both the troposphere and stratosphere. It is estimated these gases reached peak levels in the Antarctica stratosphere in 2001. However, these ozone-depleting substances typically have very long lifetimes in the atmosphere (more than 40 years). As a result of this slow decline, the ozone hole is estimated to annually very slowly decrease in area by about 0.1 to 0.2 percent for the next five to 10 years. This slow decrease is masked by large year-to-year variations caused by Antarctic stratosphere weather fluctuations. The recently completed 2006 World Meteorological Organization/United Nations Environment Programme Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion concluded the ozone hole recovery would be masked by annual variability for the near future and the ozone hole would fully recover in approximately 2065. "We now have the largest ozone hole on record," said Craig Long of NCEP. As the sun rises higher in the sky during October and November, this unusually large and persistent area may allow much more ultraviolet light than usual to reach Earth's surface in the southern latitudes.

Yes, it was very interesting. In the immediate sense, it would be fascinating to compare the different amounts of dust this year and last, given the vast differences in tropical storm numbers.