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BY PAUL SIMONS TORNADOS are devilish things to forecast accurately, as the residents of Birmingham found out when one tore through Moseley and King’s Heath on July 28 with such devastation. But we can produce our own simple forecasts — using garden hoses. This may sound mad, but the idea was developed by the respected National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US. An array of porous garden hoses used for irrigating plants was laid out over an area the size of a football field. The hoses collected sounds and funnelled them into a highly sensitive sensor that detects infrasound, very low-frequency sound waves well below the range of our hearing. Tornados give out infrasound over long distances, and by filtering out other wind noises the hosepipes gave surprisingly good warnings. Alfred Bedard, one of the engineers involved in the project, said: “We have detected sounds using this system at ranges greater than 1,000 miles.” In practice, the garden hoses gave up to 30 minutes’ warning of an approaching tornado. Another domestic tornado detector is a television set with an ordinary aerial. Tornados often come from extremely violent thunderstorms that explode with lightning and the radio waves from each lightning flash can interfere with TV reception. This does not work with cable television — though, to be fair, it is not terribly reliable with an ordinary television either. Link to Weather Eye source

Some rain overnight but it was clear and cool this morning, with blue skies :unsure:

BY PAUL SIMONS “A good October and a good blast, To blow the hog acorn and mast.” OCTOBER is a month notorious for wild winds. The great storm of October 15, 1987, brought winds gusting to 185km/h (115mph), which tore through southern England, felled 19 million trees and killed 18 people. It also spawned the famous Michael Fish quote: “Earlier today, a woman rang the BBC and said she had heard there was a hurricane on the way. Well, if you are watching, don’t worry, there isn’t.” To be fair, Fish did go on to say: “Actually the weather will be very windy.” And there lies a confusion. Meteorologists call a hurricane a revolving tropical storm with winds averaging more than 119km/h (74mph) on seas warmer than 26.5C (80F). Our seas are far too cold for hurricanes, but we do get violent storms with hurricane-force winds of the same speed. This mix-up may explain a bizarre story in the Western Mail newspaper last week, that global warming will bring hurricanes to Britain. This is highly unlikely, at least in our lifetime. But we do get the remnants of dead hurricanes. Long after a hurricane has died on land or cold seas, its huge cargo of warm, wet air is left lingering in the atmosphere. Sometimes those ghostly remnants get sucked into an ordinary Atlantic storm, boosting its power before it batters the UK. Link to Weather Eye source

BY PAUL SIMONS A HUNDRED years ago, Harold Des Voeux coined the word “smog”. Addressing the Coal Smoke Abatement Society in London, Des Voeux, a doctor, described how coal smoke and fog combined into smog; a foul, polluted air. The Daily Graphic newspaper interviewed him: “He said it required no science to see that there was something produced in great cities which was not found in the country, and that was smoky fog, or what was known as ‘smog’. ” Smog has had a long history in London. In the 12th century, large supplies of soft, bituminous “sea coal” from North East England were burnt in the capital, but it was inefficient and incredibly smoky. When a lid of warm air lay on top of cold air on the ground, smog could be trapped for days or weeks. Complaints about the foul air dated back to at least 1272 when King Edward I, on the urging of noblemen and clerics, tried to ban the burning of coal, without success. Richard III, Henry V and Elizabeth I also failed to curb the burning of coal, and in 1661 John Evelyn complained bitterly about a “hellish and dismall cloud of sea-coal” over the capital. It was not until the 1950s, after a four-day fog in 1952 killed an estimated 12,000 Londoners, that any real reform was passed, with the Clean Air Act of 1956. Link to Weather Eye source

BY PAUL SIMONS HURRICANE experts have got enough on their hands without having to worry about what to call new tropical storms, but a naming crisis will soon loom. This hurricane season there have already been 17 named storms, and we will soon run out of names for more storms. Names beginning with the letters Q, U, X, Y and Z are not used because they do not offer much scope for naming, and that leaves only four more names left this year: Stan, Tammy, Vince and Wilma. With the official hurricane season ending on November 30, the possibility of running out of names is considerable. This situation has never occurred before. Since weather records began in 1851, the greatest number of Atlantic tropical storms and hurricanes in one year was 21, in 1933, and that was when names were not usually given to storms. The hurricane authorities have a contingency plan, though. Once the alphabet is used up, any new storms will be given the names of Greek letters, from Alpha onwards. But that poses its own problem. Normally the name of an intense storm — such as Katrina or Rita — is retired from the list of names and new names have to be drafted in. So if there is a deadly Hurricane Alpha, what will replace it the next time round? Link to Weather Eye source

BY PAUL SIMONS SUMMER is hardly over, the tree leaves are barely starting to change colour and already forecasts are being made for what sort of winter we can expect. The Sunday Telegraph last weekend carried a stark warning that the coming winter is going to be bitterly cold with heavy snow, and, to add to the misery, households across Britain could face power blackouts. But before you reach for the thermal underwear, this prediction was a tentative note issued by the Met Office for utility firms, and was not a definite forecast for the winter. In fact, the long-range forecasts may change considerably over the coming weeks and months. The latest assessment was based on a big seesaw in atmospheric pressure between Iceland and the Azores, which has a major effect on our winter weather. When the pressure is low around Iceland and high by the Azores, the UK can expect mild, and often wet and windy, winters. But if the pressure builds up around Iceland, we can be plunged into bitterly cold weather and thick snow. However, this pattern of pressure can fluctuate weekly, so making a confident forecast for the months ahead is tricky, to say the least. In fact, all long-range weather forecasts are a minefield for the unwary. You only have to remember last October when there were confident predictions of a bitter winter to come — and it turned out to be largely mild. Link to Weather Eye source

BY PAUL SIMONS AFTER Hurricane Katrina, the Mississippi region could have more trouble in store. An earthquake faultline runs under the river basin and it is growing more active. This quake zone may result from the end of the last Ice Age, when North America flexed as the colossal weight of ice sheets melted. The strains of that recovery are continuing. In 1811-12 the fault erupted with several earthquakes, the greatest in the history of the US and ten times larger than the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Huge waves tore up the Mississippi River, the town of New Madrid, Missouri, was obliterated, St Louis was badly damaged, and tremors made church bells ring in Boston, 1,000 miles away. But the population around the epicentre was relatively sparse and casualties were few. Since then the faultline has been quiet. But recent studies reveal renewed activity in the past few years, and the US Geology Service calculates there is now a 40 per cent chance of a significant earthquake within the next 35 years. Worse still, this region sits on clay and sandy sediments that would behave like liquid in a quake, with catastrophic results. Memphis, Tennessee, could be devastated, putting the population of nearly one million at risk. It is expected that damage would spread through much of St Louis, nuclear power plants across the Midwest, and even reach Chicago, hundreds of miles to the north. Link to Weather Eye source

BY PAUL SIMONS A MAN in Australia turned into an electric fireball this week. He crackled with sparks, left a trail of carpet burns and one building he visited in the city of Warrnambool, Victoria, had to be evacuated when it was feared he could trigger a power failure. The man is thought to have carried more than 30,000 volts of static electricity, created entirely by his clothing. Walking around wearing synthetic materials can build up large static electricity charges, and gives nasty electric shocks on touching metal door handles or railings. The problem is particularly bad in dry conditions — water in the air is a good conductor and dissipates the charges. The static electricity comes from rubbing two different materials together. Electrons get knocked off one material and planted on the other, giving them electrical charges, and these get attracted to opposite charges. This is why rubbing a balloon on a pullover makes it stick to a wall, or why clothes clump together after they have been in a tumble dryer. In extreme cases, static electricity has set off explosions at petrol stations. If people sit in their cars while filling up, static charges build up on their bodies from the car seat. That static can discharge as a spark when they touch the metal nozzle again, igniting the petrol fumes. Link to Weather Eye source

BY PAUL SIMONS HAVE you ever noticed how the distant rumble of traffic on one day can sound like it is right next door on another?The key to this phenomenon is the weather. Unusually loud noises usually come in calm, cold weather. A strong temperature inversion can form in the atmosphere, when a lid of warm air traps colder air close to the ground. Sound waves bounce off this invisible lid, reflecting the noise down to the ground, which makes it seem louder. In fact, extreme temperature inversions have been known to carry human conversations as far as two miles (three kilometres). Not all sounds in an inversion are a problem. New research shows that elephants in Namibia broadcast extremely deep rumbles for up to three hours after sunset or just after sunrise. These are exactly the times of day in the savannah when inversion layers form and help to pass the elephant calls further. During the day the sun warms the ground, heat rises up in thermals and this puts a stop to the elephant broadcasts. According to the report in the journal Earth Interactions, elephants use these calls for finding mates, or telling one another where food and water are. Some believe that elephants can hear thunderstorms far away, and then head towards the rains to drink. Link to Weather Eye source

BY PAUL SIMONS ON FRIDAY, a thunderstorm raged over West London, with thunder that sounded like guns exploding. Later, though, the thunder changed its tune to a deep, soft rumble like “that deep and dreadful organ pipe” that Shakespeare described in The Tempest. That change in the sound of thunder tells us something about a thunderstorm. A typical lightning discharge rips through the air with more than a million volts, heating the surrounding air to more than 30,000C (55,000F), five times hotter than the surface of the Sun. The air explodes and sends out shock waves, which is what we hear as thunder. If the lightning strike is near by, the explosion comes a fraction of second after the flash and you hear a colossal bang that can reach around 120 decibels, equivalent to being 60m (200ft) from a jet aircraft during take-off. But if the lightning is much further away, the high-frequency sounds of the explosion become muffled by the clouds and rain, leaving behind a deep, rolling rumble of thunder. Lightning travels at the speed of light and is seen virtually instantly, while thunder passes at the speed of sound, about 1130km/h (700mph). You can tell the distance of a thunderstorm from that difference in speed: count the number of seconds between the flash of lightning and the thunder that follows and divide by three for kilometres, or by five for miles. Link to Weather Eye source

BY JEREMY PLESTER THIS SUMMER has been fairly mixed as far as the weather in Britain is concerned. Apart from the tornado that tore up parts of Birmingham in July, it has produced little to excite for weather watchers. Sunshine amounts, after an average June and July, picked up last month, especially for those living in the West or North West of England, Wales and the Midlands. But some folk will still be hoping that dry and sunny weather will extend deep into the autumn and produce an Indian summer. A common misconception is that an Indian summer refers to the sub-continent. In fact it was imported to the UK by early settlers in North America. The settlers took note of the calm and above-average temperatures brought about by high pressure, which sprawls from the Midwest across to the eastern seaboard during autumn. The Native Americans used the fine and dry weather to bolster their stores before the onset of winter. In the breathless air of their Indian summer they would light brush fires, the smoke from which they would use as a screen before descending on their prey. It is early to make predictions on the rest of autumn but it seems that once this weekend is over we will head into an extended period of calm and settled weather. Link to Weather Eye source

BY JEREMY PLESTER THE weather in the British Isles is pretty simple — for most of the time we are fanned by winds from the Atlantic and they bring rain, showers and brighter periods inbetween. From time to time high pressure will appear, bringing a period of calmer weather. In addition to our staple weather there are plenty of rarer events that bring distinctly different weather. One example is the Spanish plume, when an area of hot air moves north from the Spanish plateau — invariably with the accompaniment of downpours and thunderstorms. Although the term “Spanish plume” would be known and understood by weather enthusiasts, the expression has struggled to gain public understanding or acceptance. Over in the United States it is a different story: its weathermen have a range of colourful expressions that they inject into their everyday forecasts. This becomes especially useful when inclement conditions are on the way. The mention of an “Alberta clipper” will have folks around the Dakotas, Minnesota and Great Lakes preparing for a snowstorm, while the “Pineapple Express” brings colossal amounts of rain to the Pacific Northwest. Link to Weather Eye source

BY PAUL SIMONS THE final episode of this summer’s Ashes is finally upon us with England seeking at least a draw to regain the Ashes. The weather has already played its part in the series when it accounted for the best part of a day’s play in the third Test at Old Trafford — a match England might well have won if the rain had stayed away. Weather watchers will have noticed that the forecast for the finale has been chopping and changing every day this week, but as we get closer to the bowling of the first ball it looks as though wet weather will pinch a fair chunk of play. Weatherman Tony Conlan predicts: “for the vast majority of today and Friday, play will be uninterrupted but there is a question mark after tea on Friday afternoon, when scattered but heavy showers are likely to be drifting around the Greater London area.” He then went on to say: “Saturday is a different day altogether and is likely to be badly disrupted as a slow moving area of low pressure brings along showers, rain and very little cricket. All the rain should clear away by Sunday morning leaving the rest of the game uninterrupted.” The message from the forecasters then, is for England to attack, as, if this game carries on at the lightning pace of some of its predecessors, a result is still highly possible. Link to Weather Eye source

BY JEREMY PLESTER AN INABILITY to predict the weather has always been a pain for homemakers. For years we have longed for long, hot summer days with dry skies and a fresh wind; the best conditions to dry clothes on the washing line. Then, in the 1930s, the invention of the tumble dryer took the risk out of doing the laundry — but these use a great deal of electricity. Now an invention by Oliver MacCarthy, a Birmingham-based student at Brunel University, could tell us whether pegging out is the best option. He has invented the first intelligent clothes peg. The peg, despite its interesting design, looks fairly normal. But it can predict the weather and prevent washing being hung out just before an unexpected downpour. The peg takes barometric readings of pressure at half-hourly intervals and then calculates the chance of rain within the drying period. If the prediction is for rain, the peg locks, and no washing can be hung on the line. MacCarthy is now seeking backing so that he can take his designs to the shops. A prototype of the clever peg can be seen on his website, www.oliver-maccarthy.co.uk Link to Weather Eye source

BY JEREMY PLESTER ON SUNDAY night a spectacular sunset took place in the far west of Cornwall. Before the sun set in the evening, intermittent rain had turned steadily heavier as a cold front, with embedded hefty showers, approached from the west. As darkness started to fall, the rain clouds suddenly cleared away to the east-north-east, and the sunset lit the distant horizon in a flame of crimson, yellow and pink. What made the sunset particularly noteworthy was the presence of a particular type of very eerie-looking cloud — mammatus — which formed like a ghostly shield right above my head as the rain clouds cleared. Mammatus clouds form when violent convective currents within a shower can no longer sustain their upward motion and start to sink back down towards the base of the cloud. When these downdraughts reach the cloud base, a vast canopy of “sagging pouches” then develop on the underbelly of the cloud in a peculiar rippling effect. These clouds can be seen at their most dramatic along “Tornado Alley” in the United States. On Sunday night, with the sun low on the distant horizon, the setting sun brightly illuminated the bottoms of the sagging clouds, while the tops remained far more sinister with only dark greys and blacks filling in the void. Link to Weather Eye source

BY PAUL SIMONS CRICKET fans are checking the forecast for the fifth Test at the Oval on Thursday. There has been some suggestion that holding the match so far into September would be risking wet weather, but the choice of this date was inspired. London tends to be drier in September than in July or August. Average rainfall in September is 49mm (1.9in), 17 per cent less than August and 15 per cent below July. The reason is that this month is cooler and there is less energy to create the rising plumes of warm air that can trigger convective showers such as thunderstorms. Although more depressions roll in off the Atlantic in September, these usually hit the west side of Britain harder than London and the South East. Another worry is that September’s rainfall tends to be spread over a slightly longer time, thus increasing the chances of interrupted play at the Oval. But, most reassuringly, the second week of September is blessed with regular anticyclones. These bring fine dry weather, bearing out the folklore that: “September blow soft till the fruit’s in the loft.” In fact, the peak dates for high pressure are September 7-10, delivering excellent conditions for southeast England. The climax to the Test series could not have been planned better. Link to Weather Eye source

BY PAUL SIMONS THE fifth Test match between England and Australia starts next Thursday at the Oval, London, and all eyes will be on the weather. In fact the Oval cricket ground owes its origins to heavy rains and floods. In the past the River Effra, which runs through this part of southeast London, was liable to inundate the area. A report in 1809 described one such flooding: “In the neighbourhood of Kennington and Vauxhall a torrent of water has risen, which in its progress has carried away furniture, trunks of trees, cattle etc, and has destroyed a great number of bridges.” Over the years, many people were reported to have been swept away on floods. The flooding was so bad that builders steered clear of the area and it was left as an open floodplain fit only for a market garden growing vegetables. Around 1790 a road was built around it, and its oval track inspired the name for a new cricket ground laid out on the site in 1845, the home of Surrey County Cricket Club. In 1882 the Oval was the venue of the England v Australia Test which gave rise to the Ashes. Australia’s victory by seven runs prompted the Sporting Times to carry a mock obituary: “In affectionate memory of English cricket which died at the Oval on 29th August 1882. The body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia.” Link to Weather Eye source

BY PAUL SIMONS AS THE full story of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation unfolds, it is a strange twist of history that today is the 70th anniversary of the strongest hurricane that hit the US. It was a relatively small hurricane that blasted across the Florida Keys — the chain of islands at the southern tip of the state — but the winds were tightly wound around a core of exceptionally low atmospheric pressure, 892 millibars, with winds estimated at more than 200mph (320kmh). It was one of only three hurricanes of Category 5 strength to strike the United States during the 20th century. “Sheet-metal roofs became flying guillotines, whirling lumber became lethal javelins,” described one eyewitness. The storm’s winds were lit up by countless sparks, as grains of sand struck one another to produce electrical charges. Although the Keys were sparsely populated at the time, 700 First World War veterans were building railway bridges as part of Roosevelt’s New Deal programme to provide work for those left destitute by the Depression. The workers’ flimsy huts were destroyed by the winds and storm surge. More than 400 workers and residents were killed. Today the Keys are far more heavily populated, yet there is little shelter from wind and storm surges, and rapid evacuation to the mainland is difficult. Link to Weather Eye source

BY PAUL SIMONS THE devastation wreaked by Hurricane Katrina is a reminder of the deadliest hurricane in US history. On September 8, 1900, a Category 4 hurricane swept across the Gulf of Mexico and headed towards the beautiful island resort town of Galveston on the Texas coast. Hurricane warnings were given well beforehand as barometer readings plunged and telegraph reports told of stormy seas in the Caribbean heading northwards. Galveston was full of residents and tourists, but fewer than half heeded the warnings and left; some sightseers even came over from the mainland to view the spectacle of the huge waves. The hurricane hit land in the evening with wind speeds estimated at 120 mph (193kph). A train leaving Galveston was lifted clean off the tracks by the storm winds, and the only rail bridge across Galveston Bay collapsed. The sea piled in with a 4.6m (15ft) storm surge that burst through the town, tearing buildings from their foundations. Almost the entire town was wrecked, and about 10,000 people died, mostly drowned in the floodwaters. It was the deadliest weather disaster in US history. Galveston now has some of the world’s best storm-surge protection, with a sea barrier about 11 miles long and 20ft high, and all its buildings were rebuilt seven feet above the ground. Photos and film of the devastation can be seen at www.1900storm.com Link to Weather Eye source

BY PAUL SIMONS IT MAY be difficult to credit after the disaster of Hurricane Katrina, but tropical storms are good for the planet’s health. They behave as the Earth’s air conditioners, removing huge amounts of heat from the tropics and dumping it as warm air in the colder latitudes. More surprisingly, a hurricane encourages living creatures. The winds churn the seas, dragging deeper, cold water with valuable nutrients to the surface. This up-welling fertilises phytoplankton, tiny plant-like organisms, which grow into massive blooms; the greater the storm, the bigger the bloom. The teeming phytoplankton help to alleviate global warming by absorbing huge amounts of carbon dioxide. They also provide a feeding frenzy for fish, many of which thrive after a hurricane. Even the battering of coasts by huge waves can stimulate creatures along the shoreline. After the havoc caused by Hurricane Isabel on the US eastern seaboard in September 2003, many fish species doubled in number, boosted by the extra nutrients and oxygen in the water. And even on land nature seems to repair hurricane damage quickly. When Hurricane Joan swept into Nicaragua in 1986 it flattened hundreds of square miles of prime forest. But within months a juvenile forest had grown from new saplings and snapped tree trunks that resprouted. Link to Weather Eye source

BY PAUL SIMONS WITH so much devastation and disruption from Hurricane Katrina, people often ask if there is anything we can do to tame these tropical storms. One proposal was to coat the surface of the sea with olive oil to stop hurricanes feeding off the warm water which supplies their energy — but the rough seas prevent oil slicks from forming. A more fanciful idea was to tow an iceberg down to Florida to cool the water temperature, or to build large fans on the coast to blow away approaching storms. Recently a company in Florida proposed dropping tons of super-absorbent powder into the top of a hurricane to suck it dry. A more worrying idea was to destabilise a hurricane by exploding a nuclear warhead — but hurricanes are thousands of times more powerful than any bomb, and the radioactive fallout would create an even worse disaster. In the 1960s the US began a promising project to weaken hurricanes by seeding them with silver iodide particles that would encourage clouds to form around the eye of the storm. This, it was hoped, would weaken the storm by strangling its eye. But after 20 years’ work there was still no clear proof that this worked. In reality, it is probably far too risky to try changing a hurricane in case we accidentally make it worse by intensifying it or sending it off on an unexpected track. Link to Weather Eye source

BY PAUL SIMONS IF you are on the coast of Britain today, it might be worth looking out for unusual marine life. Six fin whales were spotted last week in the Irish Sea, about ten miles off the Pembrokeshire coast. The fin whale is the largest animal on the planet after the blue whale — it can weigh 80 tonnes — and this was the largest number of these whales spotted in UK waters. The fin whale sighting came only days after 2 humpback whales, 10 minke whales and around 2,000 dolphins were seen off the West Wales coast. These unusual numbers of visitors were gorging themselves on extraordinary numbers of mackerel and herring, themselves feeding off rich supplies of plankton. The plankton were swept up on the North Atlantic current, which is flowing more strongly and pushing further north than usual, and has encouraged warm-water creatures such as basking sharks and tuna to venture further north. Whether this is because of temporary changes in the currents or because they are related to global warming is difficult to say. But all around Britain’s coasts warm-water creatures have been seen much more frequently over the past decade. Fishermen in southern England have been catching hauls of octopuses, squid, sardines and anchovies — creatures more often seen in the Mediterranean — while Scottish fishermen are catching red mullet and tuna. Link to Weather Eye source

BY PAUL SIMONS THE Bank Holiday weekend looks like a clear split between a dry South and a wet and windy North. This is hardly surprising: we tend to have wet weather blowing in from the Atlantic at this time of the year — which explains why the August Bank Holiday is so often a disaster. The first of the late-August holidays in 1965 was cool, cloudy with blustery winds and intermittent rain. The following year was even worse, as heavy downpours and thunderstorms spread northwards across the country on Sunday night and Monday, dropping torrents of rain over a wide area, and around 50mm at Winchester. Probably the worst of the holidays was in 1986, when the remnants of Hurricane Charley battered the entire country. Rain fell in torrents, winds gusted to 75mph on the Devon coast and in parts of North Wales well over 120mm of rain fell and caused flooding. The catalogue of depressing bank holidays is so long that there might be a case for England and Wales returning to the original Bank Holiday on the first Monday of August, which continues only in Scotland. However, the weather archives reveal that a surprisingly large number of these dates were also pretty disappointing, often cool and cloudy, sometimes with showers. Perhaps the whole idea of an August public holiday is jinxed. Link to Weather Eye source

BY PAUL SIMONS “HOW beautiful is the rain!” said Henry Longfellow in his poem Rain in Summer. Have you ever noticed how the sky can turn amazingly bright during a rainstorm? It can seem to sparkle as if bathed in bright light. This seems to go against intuition — after all, everything goes dark before the shower breaks, so you would expect heavy rain to turn things even darker. But each raindrop can behave like a tiny mirror, reflecting sunlight falling on it. During a heavy downpour the cascades of raindrops become a shower of liquid mirrors, bouncing light many times in a dazzling display, leaving the sky bathed in light from all directions, rather as a mirrorball casts bright lights all over a dancehall. In fact, the heavier the shower, the brighter this display of light can be. The reason is that the raindrops in a heavy shower are particularly large and have a larger surface area to reflect light. The reflections of raindrops also explain why the sky is brighter under a rainbow. As sunlight passes through a raindrop, it bends and forms the multicoloured bow. It is also reflected off the back of the raindrop and beams into the sky underneath the rainbow. In fact, you can think of the whole effect as a shiny disk brightening towards its rim, where the rainbow appears in all its glory. Link to Weather Eye source

BY PAUL SIMONS IF YOU think the summer weather in Britain is bad at the moment, spare a thought for the rest of Europe where conditions have been much worse. A massive, slow-moving storm has plagued a swath of the Continent from Switzerland down to Turkey over the past few days, and dozens of people have died in floods, landslides or from lightning strikes. Worst hit was Romania, already reeling from rains and flooding for much of the summer. The latest storm has left 18 dead, some 20,000 homes inundated and more than 1,000 bridges damaged. In neighbouring Bulgaria the death toll from floods has climbed to 26 since June, and in Croatia many tourists have abandoned their holidays as resorts turned into swamps. Parts of Switzerland, Austria and Germany have had a month’s worth of rain in a week — southern Germany received 142mm (5.6in) over the past three days alone. The Alps have turned into a treacherous danger zone as steep valleys funnel the rains into raging torrents which in turn trigger landslides, crushing houses, bridges and buildings. Five people were killed in Switzerland this week. The outlook for the rest of this week looks equally grim. The storm that soaked the UK on Wednesday was particularly vigorous because it was wrapped up with the leftovers from a hurricane. It is now continuing eastwards and promises to drop even more rain over continental Europe. Link to Weather Eye source