World weather news

World weather news, January 1995

1st: USA tornado count was 2 for December (normal = 21) and (provisionally) 1111 for 1994 (normal = 863).
1st: 1994 was very wet over portions of the eastern United States, especially the Tennessee Valley. 73.70ins of rain fell at Chattanooga TN (previous wettest was 1929 with 72.37 ins. It was the third wettest year at Savannah GA with 69.44 ins - 4 ins less than record. Grand Rapids MI had their third wettest year with 46.58 ins, (cf 1883 with 52.14 ins).
1st: Much of the eastern half of the USA recorded above normal temperatures during the last several weeks. As a result, very little snow has fallen east of the Rockies. In December only 4 ins of snow fell at Binghamton NY - the lowest-ever December total.
1st: Stormy weather played havoc with shipping off the Dutch coast, causing the crew of one vessel to abandon it.
1st: 16 workers were airlifted from a North Sea drilling rig after heavy seas caused one of its legs to shift.
3rd: Up to 3ft of `lake-effect snow' fell along the south shore of Lake Erie from an arctic air mass.
4th: Heavy rain across coastal areas of central and southern California (up to 5ins in 6 hrs).
4th: Two died and dozens were injured as snow storms and fierce winds swept Italy, blocking roads and railway lines and cutting electricity. -13F in the Dolomites.
4th: 102 dead in 3 days due to a cold snap in Bangladesh, with the temperature down to 4C (a record for the country); normal January lows are around 15C.
5th: Snow drifts up to 5 ft deep in Californian mountains after a Pacific storm. 2.24ins of rain in San Diego CA from this storm was the wettest-ever 24-hr fall there.
5th: lake-effect snow depths downwind of Lake Ontario of up to 62ins reported.
6th: Ice-glaze made roads impassable from Oklahoma to West Virginia.
6th: Gusts to 147 mph during a thunderstorm at Seymour Johnson AFB NC.
6th: Strongest snowstorm in years blanketed Paris with enough snow to bring one sportsman to the Eiffel Tower for some skiing.
8th: Over 6ins of rain in 24hrs in parts of California.
9th: More heavy rain in Oregon and California; 11.9ins fell in 72hrs at Malibu CA. Several hundred people had to leave their homes due to floods.
9th: In New Zealand a punishing dry spell has parched farmland from Kaitaia in the far north to Christchurch on the South Island, forcing many farmers to slaughter stock earlier than planned and sell onto a weak market. Gisborne received a record low of just 2mm of rainfall in December (normal 68mm). Nearby Napier and Hastings got 1mm each.
10th: Up to 8ins of rain in northern California in 24 hrs, with up to 12 ins in southern California in 24hrs. Flooding increased in extent.
11th: 80F at Shreveport LA was a record high for the 11th.
3rd-12th: For the period of January 3-12, Santa Barbara got 17.19 inches of rain (over twice the normal for all of January).
13th: Atmospheric and oceanic features during December are consistent with the development of mature warm ENSO episode conditions in the tropical Pacific. Convection increased over the central equatorial Pacific, and low-level equatorial westerly anomalies strengthened in the vicinity of the date line. Equatorial Pacific SST anomalies increased slightly from the date line eastward to the South American coast, and remained more than 1 degC above normal throughout this region. (CAC ENSO advisory 95/1)
13th-16th: Unusually mild in eastern USA; 64F at Mansfield (Ohio), 66F at Burlington VT, 53F at Caribou (ME), 67F at Massena (NY) and 69F at Providence RI were January records; the mild weather led to significant snowmelt and some flooding.
13th: Over 4ins of rain in 24hrs across California.
14th-15th: 3 killed by lightning and falling buildings in Cuba as heavy rains halted the sugar cane harvest.
16th: At least 6 died about 440 miles NW of Buenos Aires when torrential rain swelled a stream, sweeping away two cars.
17th: 14 people killed by an avalanche that struck the village of Sudavik (Iceland).
14th-17th: Unusual cyclone over the Mediterranean (Sicily-Greece-Libya region) with distinct `eye' and hurricane-like cloud walls.
17th: Water rationing resumed in Puerto Rico, following lower-than-normal rainfall that began in August 1993.
18th: Overnight snowfall (3-4 ins) in the Sierra Nevada (Spain) followed a special mass aimed at St Antony, praying for an end to the lack of snow that was placing the World Alpine Ski Championships in jeopardy.
18th: Hail up to softball and baseball size accompanied tornadoes in Texas.
18th: Spain's worst drought this century has left fields in the centre and south dry and cracked, hit production of key crops and forced water restrictions in money-spinning holiday resorts. The damaging drought hit parts of Spain for the fifth year in succession.
20th: The Indian military rescued 5,000 people after snow and avalanches cut off a key Himalayan highway; 110 were killed by the avalanches.
21st: Heavy rain cut roads, flooded homes, polluted water supplies and killed 2 people in western France. 3.5 ins of rain fell in 72 hours, equivalent to two months' normal rainfall.
21st: Over 1,000 people were evacuated from their homes in the northern Argentine town of Posadas after torrential rains swelled the Parana river.
23rd: 8 people froze to death and another 8 died in car crashes on Moscow's treacherously icy streets during the weekend. 41 people were taken to hospitals suffering from frost-bite and 84 were injured in car accidents.
23rd: Fierce winds, rain and flooding lashed Germany, leaving 3 people dead. Winds up to 95 mph tore roofs from buildings and snapped trees.
24th: A hospital and several homes in Melsungen, central Germany, were evacuated because the Fulda River had flooded parts of that city. The Fulda hit a record depth of 19.6 feet in Rotenburg.
24th: Up to 7 ins of rain in California in 24hrs from a subtropical airstream, resulting in further flooding. Unusually warm as far north as Washington state.
25th: Five people died in car accidents on icy roads in Germany. Heavy rains have flooded the Rhine, the Mosel and other rivers over their banks.
25th: 2.42ins of rain so far this month at Las Vegas NV (the wettest January on record).
26th: Bitterly cold in Alaska for the first time this month, -56F at Jim River.
26th: The 1995 Alpine skiing world championships, due to start on the 30th in the Spanish resort of Sierra Nevada, were officially postponed because of lack of snow.
26th: Dutch civil defense forces braced for the worst flooding since 1926, after the rain-swollen Maas River surged over its banks. The towns of Borgharen and Itteren were evacuated, with the Maas approaching a record level of 46 metres above the Normal Amsterdam Level (NAP), the national calibration standard in this flat country where water levels are meticulously monitored and controlled.
26th: 6 teenagers died when a crane toppled during a storm by a gust of wind crashed onto a school in Toul, eastern France. Rainfall in western France has been the heaviest for 150 years. In Paris, the Seine river was 13 feet above its normal level and roadways running low alongside its banks were under water and closed to traffic.
26th: At least 19 people died as blizzards and record rain swept northern Europe. Four people died in fierce snowstorms sweeping northern England, apparently through heart attacks or hypothermia. Up to 14ins of snow fell at Leeds (UK). A 20-year-old Swedish woman was killed in an avalanche while skiing in the Norwegian mountains. The German city of Cologne was bracing for a tidal wave to surge up the Rhine and over city flood barriers.
27th: Widespread flooding in northwest Europe (all week).
27th: Eighty percent of Europe's fleet of oil and chemicals barges are now stranded by floods that have closed the river Rhine in Germany.
27th: Gusts up to 130 mph ripped across Switzerland, where roads were blocked by fallen trees. The temperature in Lucerne plunged by 10 degC in one 15-minute period; 6-12 ins of rain fell in southern Belgium.
27th: In Denmark, heavy rains hit the island of Bornholm, flooding some areas. At least 10 people were injured in car accidents on icy roads.
27th: Temperature fell to -60F at Jim River, Alaska, low even by Alaskan standards.
28th: Cologne flooded by the Rhine; 2000 evacuated in the southern Dutch province of Limburg.
29th: In northeastern France, the Meuse River topped record levels.
29th: Almost all inland shipping banned in the Netherlands.
30th: The National Rivers Authority in Great Britain said 9 inches of rain had fallen this month in the River Ton catchment area near Taunton, making it the wettest January in more than 35 years.
30th: Las Vegas measured the most rain of any January in its history, with a total of 3 ins so far. The previous record was 0.59 ins in 1949.
31st: About 250,000 people now evacuated in Holland - biggest evacuation since 1953.
31st: French insurers estimated the cost of the flooding in France at $382 million to $573 million - the most costly in 100 years.
31st: Storms gave Red Bluff (California) 20.86 ins of rain in January -- their wettest-ever month. The annual mean total is 20.49 ins.
31st: At least 28 killed in total by the storms and floods in Europe.

World weather news, February 1995

1st-2nd: 88F in Los Angeles CA (the highest ever on the 1st), and 94F on the 2nd there.
1st: Rhine slowing ebbing in Cologne after reaching a record depth; floods in NE France slowly receding.
1st: The winter of 1994-95 has so far been characterised by low snowfall amounts and mild tenperatures in the east and northeast USA. Low snowfall totals so far include just 6 ins in Boston MA, 0.2 ins at New York City and a trace at Philadelphia PA.
2nd: Groundhog Day: For only the 11th time in more than 100 years, Punxsutawney Phil, the world famous groundhog and furry weather forecaster, did not see his shadow this morning, signalling that spring is right around the corner.
2nd: Floodwaters in Holland slowly starting to recede - but threat of collapsing dykes still remains.
3rd: Sunshine and SW winds gave another warm day in S and SW parts of the USA; 94F at Los Angeles equalled the all-time highest temperature for February.
4th-5th: Evacuees returning home in Holland after river levels start to recede.
4th: First major winter storm of in NE USA (up to 16ins of snow fell).
5th: Cold air from Canada flowing into NE USA (windchills down to -55F in New England).
5th: 38F at Bettles (Alaska) - second warmest February day ever there.
4th-6th: Torrential rains in south and central Iran, cutting off villages.
6th: Dutch rivers and canals opened to shipping.
7th: 15 killed in Sao Paulo (Brazil) by heavy rains and landslides.
7th-8th: Floods in northern Israel after heavy rains; 20ins of snow fell on the Golan Heights.
9th: 125th anniversary of the US National Weather Service - founded by President Grant.
9th: Drought from Portugal to Italy; in south of Spain, reservoirs are only 10% full.
9th: Lesotho has suffered drought for the past four years but experts said the drought conditions increased during the summer season - planting activities abandoned in some areas. In South Africa, corn harvests were forecast at 6M tons, compared to 12M tons last year. Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia, Malawi and Zambia were also expecting below normal harvests.
11th-12th: Up to 12 ins of snow in Kansas and 28ins in Colorado.
13th: A dense smog surpassing air pollution danger levels choked Istanbul; shipping in the Bosphorus was stopped. SO2 levels were 5 times the WHO limit.
13th: 4 commercial jets damaged at Miami Airport by thunderstorm gusts.
13th: At least 12 killed in USA by a winter storm from Oregon to Texas. Several died as ice from freezing rain caused road accidents.
13rd: A delayed monsoon has damaged Indonesia's first rice harvests of the year on Java Island.
14th: WMO says the ozone layer has shriveled to a record low over Siberia (about 25-35% of average).
10th-14th: Over 400 avalanches around Denver CO (USA) after a winter storm.
14th: Two killed by rainstorms in southern California.
15th: 40000 forced to evacuate in Asuncion (Paraguay) as the River Paraguay rose after rains.
15th: A tornado and hailstorm struck Bobai county in Guangxi (China) killing 4 and injuring 365. Hailstones up to 15kg reported - 2000 animals also killed.
16th: 2 tornadoes in Alabama killed 5 and injured over 100 people.
19th: 91F in the centre of Los Angeles was a record for the date.
20th: A warm Santa Ana wind across central and southern California resulted in 94F in the centre of Los Angeles - an all-time record for February, as was the 63F at Spokane WA.
21st: 74F at Norfolk NE was a record for February.
22nd: Canada, with an average yearly temperature of -4.4C, is no longer the coldest country in the world, government agency Environment Canada said. Russia, with an average yearly temperature of -5.3C, now holds that record. The break-up of the Soviet Union, formerly the second coldest country in the world, gave Russia the lead it needed. The only other competition was Outer Mongolia, which came in a distant third with an average yearly temperature of -0.7C.
23rd: During January sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies decreased slightly throughout the region from the date line eastward to the South American coast. However, all three Nino indices remained near +1C and SST anomalies greater than +2C continued along the equator near 170W, where enhanced convection was also observed.
23rd: 70F at Klamath OR was a record for February.
24th: Tibet is being battered by its worst snowstorm in half a century, with livestock freezing to death and nearly 1,000 people cut off. The disaster-stricken areas are the grasslands of northern Tibet, where snow has been falling since mid-February. The number of people and livestock suffering from frostbite is rising, and in some areas animals have frozen to death, officials said.
24th: Unseasonably warm across parts of the northern and Central Plains of USA; 61F at Butte MT, 69F at Helena MT and 75F at Rapid City SD were all-time Feb. record maxima.
25th: Blowing snow lashed the French Alps, while a large avalanche buried chalets in one valley and authorities searched for eight missing skiers and thousands of travellers were stranded. Eight people were found unhurt under snow as deep as 24 feet from the snow slide that crashed through the Tarentaise Valley in the Savoie region near Chambery.
25th: Warm spell continues across the Plains and Rockies: 80F at Grand Island NE was an all-time Feb. record.
27th: Heavy snowfalls in Montana and Nebraska due to an Arctic front.
21st-27th: Tropical Cyclone Bobby formed near 15S 120E on 21 Feb. Moving southwest parallel to the Australian coast, the system was named Bobby the next day. Bobby turned SSW on 23 Feb. as it reached hurricane strength, and this track continued on 24 Feb. as the cyclone made landfall over northwest Australia just east of Onslow. Maximum sustained winds reached 105-110 kt at landfall. Onslow reported a peak gust of 99 kt and a minimum pressure of 950 mb. In addition, Onslow reported 425 mm of rain (their annual average is 267mm). Current press reports indicate that 4 people may have been killed with as many as 10 others missing.
28th: An ice shelf has broken free from Antarctica due to a gradual rise in the region's temperature and turned into a giant iceberg heading north into the Pacific, British scientists said Monday. They said warming of the climate over the last half century had sliced the iceberg, 48 by 23 miles and 656 feet 2 inches) thick, off the Larsen Ice Shelf south of New Zealand.
28th: Ice storm glazes roads and `sidewalks' across New England.
28th: USA tornado count for February was 13 (normal is 22). 23.3ins of snow at Cheyenne WY was a record high total for Feb., while Madison WI had their driest Feb. on record (1.5mm), as did Oklahoma City OK (1.0mm). Both Las Vegas NV and Los Angeles Civic Center had their warmest-ever Feb.

World weather news, March 1995

3rd: Two people were killed as heavy snow fell on Britain Friday, paralyzing roads and railways and leaving thousands of homes without power. Wales was hardest hit. More than 10,000 homes were left without power after cables were brought down by storms. In London, transport officials said the underground railway network was plunged into chaos by frozen rails, making thousands of commuters late for work.
8th: A strong cold front moving eastward across the USA with moist and unstable air flowing north from the Gulf of Mexico provided the fuel for strong to severe thunderstorms from the central Gulf Coast to the lower Ohio Valley. 36 tornadoes were reported.
8th: Cold Arctic air spilled south into the U.S. engulfing much of the plains and Mississippi Valley region. Fresh snow cover and light winds allowed temperatures to drop to some of the coldest levels of the winter over the Plains -32F at Aberdeen SD was a record for March.
6th: Australia's protracted drought appears to be ending with the most intense cyclonic activity in four years drenching most of the country over the past 10 days, according to rural industry and weather bureau spokesmen. Meteorologist Bill Wright from the National Climate Centre said tropical cyclones Bobby, Violet and Warren, have battered the west and east coasts and caused massive rainfall. Some areas have received their average annual rainfalls in under 48 hours with some towns in Western Australia receiving over 400 mm in 24 hours.
8th: Rock slides caused by heavy rain wiped out trails and damaged the Grand Canyon's main water pipeline, forcing hotel guests to eat off paper plates and cancel hiking trips.
8th: In the USA, a national average temperature of 36.03F was the second highest value (after 36.60F in 1991-92) for winter in 100 years.
10th: Showers and thunderstorms brought locally heavy rain and flooding to parts of California; up to 250mm fell in 24hrs.
11th: Up to 125 mm of rain in parts of California; 11 died as a result of the floods. Coastal regions in Monterrey County received 500 mm in 72 hrs.
11th: Two cross-country skiers have died in the Sierra Nevada mountains (USA) during a fierce winter storm.
11th: Landslides caused by heavy rains in the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo killed a total of seven people.
12th-13th: Thunderstorms, rarely seen at this time of year, dumped more rain on Bahrain in less than 24 hours than the Persian Gulf island normally sees in a year. A record 2.72 ins was recorded during a three-hour downpour on the 12th. The previous one-day record was 2.6 ins on April 7, 1961. The storms continued on the 13th, and by noon 3.97 inches of rain had fallen over a 36-hour period. The storm was caused by a trough of low pressure moving in from the eastern Mediterranean and mixing with warm, moisture-laden air at low levels.
13th: Another Pacific storm hit northern California as the death toll rose to 13.
13th: The death toll from violent storms that battered eastern Sicily rose to at least 12. 6 died due to severe floods, the others when a ship sank.
14th: -66F at Umiat (Alaska) was a record low for the date (14degF below previous record).
18th: Thunderstorms associated with an upper level weather system crossing Florida and a stationary front curving through the southeast corner of the nation produced large hail 50 mm in diameter at Fort Lauderdale.
19th: Flash floods drowned 7 villagers, injured 9 others and destroyed hundreds of homes in southern Egypt. More than 780 homes in 10 villages were reported damaged or destroyed by heavy rains. Surging water swept away schools and small factories, and forced the evacuation of thousands of people.
20th: A drought affecting Vietnam's main coffee-growing province, Dac Lac, could cut production next season by at least 30,000 tonnes or 16 percent of national output.
21st: In Qatar, record rainfall forced the government to close schools for the second time in 10 days. Two inches of rain fell overnight in the capital, Doha. The previous highest rainfall was in 1962, when 1.72 inches of rain fell in a single day. Schools also closed March 13, when the country of less than 550,000 people was lashed by heavy thunderstorms.
21st: Estimated crop losses in this month's storms in California have risen to almost $400 million, the California Department of Food and Agriculture.
21st: Downslope southwesterly winds in the low levels of the atmosphere have resulted in very warm temperatures across much of the area from the western High Plains to the central and Southern Plains states of the USA. 86F reported in parts of Kansas.
22nd: More downslope winds east of the Rockies with 96F recorded in Texas.
22nd: A cold Alaska storm front arrived over northern California during the night, unleashing heavy rain and hail and creating blizzard conditions in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where up to three feet of snow fell over a 24-hour period.
22nd: Scientists who thought they understood the weather of Mars after American spacecraft landed there in the 1970s are learning that the red planet's climate is not so predictable. New photos from the Hubble Space Telescope released this week show that Mars' atmosphere is clearer and cooler than when NASA's Viking spacecraft orbited the planet and dropped a lander to the surface in 1976. Dust storms raged during the first year of the Viking visit, leaving the Martian atmosphere choked with dust particles.
22nd: In the parched high veld around Johannesburg and in the Northern Cape, rain fell just as Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip arrived during their state visit to South Africa. The dusty diamond centre of Kimberley and the resettlement site of Bakwene Ba Magopa near Potchefstroom had not seen rain in weeks -- until Prince Philip turned up on Wednesday.
23rd: A strong, cold surface and upper level low pressure area has finally moved inland over the West Coast of the USA, bringing a gradual end to the heavy precipitation in California. Up to 150 cm of snow fell from this latest storm in the Sierras, where snow depths of up to 500cm now exist. In Alpine Meadows CA the depth is up to 800 cm.
23rd: Still very warm east of the Rockies: 89F at Atlanta GA was a March record.
23rd: Drought has hit nearly 18 million hectares of Chinese farmland, mainly in the north. Affected areas include Beijing and the nearby port city of Tianjin as well as major grain-producing provinces such as Hebei and Shandong. A lack of rain and snow for the past 80 days has made the drought worse.
29th: Showers and thunderstorms associated with low pressure over the northwestern Gulf of Mexico have produced very heavy rain from southeast Texas to coastal Alabama. Up to 125 mm fell.
26th: A strong low pressure area was moved slowly from eastern Nebraska into western Iowa, giving Tup to 36 inches of new snow, with three to six foot drifts, in the bear paw mountains of north-central Montana.
31st: More than eight inches of rain this week soaked the English Turn G.C. course, forcing a five-hour delay of the second round of the New Orleans Classic, and only half the field completed play before a suspension for darkness was called.
31st: In southern California San Luis Obispo was deluged with 418mm of rain in March, shattering their previous record for March (325mm, 1991).
31st: Parts of southern Europe shivered in unseasonal wintry weather with villages in Sicily isolated by snow, schools closed in southern Italy and the U.N. obliged to rescue soldiers from a blizzard in Bosnia. The blast of cold weather in early spring blanketed Bulgaria with snow and 59 people were killed in Romania when a plane bound for Brussels crashed in heavy rain and snow shortly after taking off from Bucharest. Snow storms left 900 villages in northern Bulgaria without water, electricity and telephone services.

World weather news, April 1995

4th: Strong thunderstorms and damaging wind gusts accompanied a frontal passage through the upper Ohio Valley, the Hudson Valley and southern New England. Winds blew a 30 ton air conditioning unit of a roof in Elizabeth NJ.
4th: Up to 200 mm of rain in Texas causing flooding.
4th: During a full moon the Earth's average global temperature is 0.02 K warmer than during a new moon, according to Robert Balling and Randall Cerveny at Arizona State Univ. (Science, 10 Mar.)
4th: Indonesia's sugar output is expected to be hit by a drought for the second consecutive year
5th: Prime Minister Prince Mbilini appealed for international drought aid for more than 90,000 people facing starvation in Swaziland.
8th: Eight members of a girls' softball team and two coaches were struck by lightning after they sought shelter from a storm near a row of trees, in west virginia, USA.
9th: A tornado battered southern and central Bangladesh, killing at least 37 people and injuring more than 1,000. The tornado struck Munshiganj in central Bangladesh and Chittagong and Cox's Bazar. It was accompanied by hail and heavy rains.
10th: Two inch hail (about the size of a chicken egg) pounded western Geary county KS at midmorning. Morning thunderstorms dropped golfball size hail on parts of Oklahoma City OK.
13th: Widespread drought will result in poor cereal harvests this year in much of southern Africa, the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization said. The agency said poor rains in Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe and parts of Malawi, Mozambique and Zambia will lead to well below average harvests.
15th-18th: Hailstorms in China's southern Fujian Province killed four people and more than 10,000 head of livestock. The storms caused widespread damage in several hundred villages. Some reports spoke of basketball-size hail. 150 people were injured by the hail.
16th: Thunderstorms packing golfball to baseball size hail hit portions of the Kansas City metro area early this evening. in addition, heavy rains saturated the metro area producing some flash flooding.
18th: A very powerful line of thunderstorms raked portions of the Southern Plains (USA) last night into with over 14 reports of tornadoes and close to 100 reports of wind damage and/or hail.
20th: Need rain for your crops? Catch frogs and bind them in matrimony, farmers in northern Bangladesh say. People in Rangpur province of Bangladesh, where rain is the only way of irrigating fields, are catching frogs and performing mock marriages in the belief it will bring showers, a newspaper reported. At least 12 such 'marriages' were performed in five villages last week, some according to Islamic custom and others according to Hindu traditions. A dry spell has been sweeping across northern Bangladesh, with temperatures reaching 99 degrees. The country's main crops -- rice, jute and tea -- depend on rains that usually come by mid-March.
16th: The Easter Sunday Storm at Merimbula (Australia) dampened the holiday mood somewhat. Merimbula is a holiday town on the south coast, about 350km south of Sydney. Pambula is a smaller holiday town about 6km south of Merimbula. A cold front moving rapidly eastwards across the south of NSW produced an extensive line of thunderstorms. From this line, one or more tornadoes inflicted damage on the Merimbula/Pambula area. Damage was extensive. About 40 people were treated for minor injuries. In Merimbula, one house was completely destroyed while 80 others and 10 motels suffered significant damage. In Pambula 20 houses were damaged and the storm whipped through the caravan park causing extensive damage to buildings and caravans. Some of the vans were moved up to 100 metres. The Severe Weather Team had the day off on Easter Sunday. Thunderstorms were forecast for the district and the State Emergency Service was warned of squally winds of 40/45 knots likely to occur in the area, however no Severe Thunderstorm Advice was issued. The storms were at the limits of the Sydney and Melbourne radars.
21st: Floods killed at least nine people and injured 11 near the Iranian holy city of Mashhad. They swept away three houses, demolished three bridges and damaged roads.
24th: Barbecue season has begun, bikinis are out in force and swimmers have started flocking to the Moscow River. For the last week, a record-setting April warm spell has catapulted the Russian capital from the dregs of winter into what feels like summer. Every day has set a new record -- with temperatures Monday again reaching the mid-70s. 'There's been no such weather in 120 years of scientific observation,' Roman Vilfand of the Russian Hydrometeorological Center said.
25th: President Ernesto Zedillo (of Mexico) called for emergency measures for four northern states where a severe drought has killed thousands of cattle and withered crops. Little rain has fallen on the border states of Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas, Chihuahua and Durango for about a year, depleting reservoirs.
21st-22nd: Unseasonable frost and snow across northern and central Spain has destroyed a large section of the wine crop and damaged fruit and vegetable production. The damage was particularly severe because crops were well advanced due to balmy temperatures in the weeks preceding last weekend's freak weather.
23rd: Severe thunderstorms began during the early morning hours over northern Louisiana and spread eastward across Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia during the morning hours. Very large hail, up to the size of baseballs, caused widespread damage in the Shreveport LA area. (22nd)
Over the past two days 4--10ins of rain fell over portions of northern Louisiana forcing creeks and streams out of their banks and flooding many roads.
29th: Thunderstorms over north central Texas produced baseball size hail (2.75in) at Sherman.
29th-30th: American Airlines cancelled about 300 flights on Monday due to planes being damaged by hail as big as softballs at Dallas on 29th. Insurance companies estimated hail damage to homes, cars and businesses at up to $220M.
29th: A storm tore through northeastern Bangladesh, killing at least 5 people and injuring 100 others.
30th: Unseasonably warm April for Yakutat (Alaska). The high this afternoon of 71F was a record for the month as a whole. The previous record (70F) was established yesterday.
30th: 132 tornadoes in the USA in April -- long-term average is 114
30th: A dry weather pattern prevailed over much of the USA mid-Atlantic region in April; Greensboro (0.41ins) and Cape Hatteras (0.44ins) NC had their driest ever April.

World weather news, May 1995

1st: In northeast Broward County, Florida (USA), lightning struck and seriously injured a 7-year-old girl as she played softball.
3rd: Sparse rainfall has forced the Puerto Rico government to ration water for the second time in two years. Beginning May 9, 1.4 million residents will endure dry taps for 12 hours every other day. The rationing is expected to be tightened if rainfall does not increase soon. There has been little rain since March.
3rd: Scientists are keeping an eye on an unusual rise in sea level that, if it persists, could have a dramatic impact on the world's coastlines. Satellite data show sea level has risen on average 3.9mm per year during the past two years. The rise was about twice that detected by land-based gauges over the past century. A report on the study is published in the journal Science. R. Steven Nerem (NASA) said El Nino's warming of cold water could have caused a thermal expansion of water molecules that, over the vast expanse of the ocean, is enough to show up as a slight rise in sea level.
4th: Southern Britain heatwave: 27.4C in Maidenhead on the 4th was comparable with the highest readings there so early in the year (81F recorded on a few occasions before May 10 since 1953).
5th: At least two people died in weather-related circumstances as Britain sweltered in unseasonably high spring temperatures that sent air pollution readings soaring. (5th)
5th: A storm system moved into the western U.S. today and as moisture increased over eastern New Mexico and Texas, the atmosphere became unstable allowing severe thunderstorms to develop. Baseball size hail was reported in Fisher county TX. Mid-evening severe thunderstorms moved into Fort Worth-Dallas area and produced softball size hail. This hail combined with winds in excess of 70 mph causing extensive damage to automobiles and buildings. Tremendous thunderstorms pummeled the Fort Worth and Dallas areas of north Texas around sunset. A large supercell thunderstorm developed during the late afternoon hours to the west and southwest of Fort Worth, just ahead of an eastward moving squall line. The supercell and squall line merged in the vicinity of Fort Worth and resulted in large losses of life and property. The latest reports indicate 13 persons were killed during the storm and at least 90 others were injured. Many vehicles and some buildings were badly damaged by very large hail driven by 60 to 70 mph winds. Hail stones reached the size of softballs...and hail up to two ins in diameter covered the ground to a depth of two feet in Anneta TX. Early estimates suggest damage may reach into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
7th: A large outbreak of severe thunderstorms affected much of the central and Southern Plains. A total of 30 tornadoes were reported, mainly in parts of northwest Texas and southern Oklahoma in association with a supercell thunderstorm ahead of a large squall line. A tyre manufacturing plant was heavily damaged in Ardmore OK. Over 200 additional reports of large hail and damaging winds were received from the twenty-four hour period ending at 7 AM CDT on the 8th.
8th: 13 people died and at least 14 were missing after torrential rains swept away a road in southern Chile.
9th: An extraordinary rainfall event occurred overnight in New Orleans LA. A large thunderstorm complex moved across much of southeast Texas and southern Louisiana during the day, then stalled over southeast Louisiana during the evening hours. Extremely moist air from the Gulf of Mexico... with dewpoint temperatures in the mid to upper 70S...helped maintain the thunderstorm complex and contributed to the extreme rainfall rates. Between 10 and 11 PM CDT last night 4.57 ins of rain deluged the New Orleans Lakefront airport and over 8 ins in the two hour period ending at midnight. 12.24 ins fell in the 24hrs to 7pm CDT. Parts of the New Orleans metropolitan area received as much as 15 to 22 ins of rain, resulting in severe street flooding and water in homes and businesses. An unofficial report identified the flooding as the worst in the history of New Orleans.
9th: Seasonal rains this year are expected to end a year-long drought in parts of western and central Japan. The Meteorological Agency predicted May would be cloudier with more rain than normal while temperatures and rainfall in June and July would be about average.
9th: Afternoon and evening thunderstorms developing along and ahead of a cold front crossing the middle Mississippi Valley spawned numerous tornadoes in eastern Iowa...and northern and central Illinois. 34 tornadoes were reported in Illinois and 13 tornadoes were reported in Iowa.
12th: Damage from violent storms and heavy rain that killed 6 people in SE Louisiana this week may reach $3 billion.
12th: Severe thunderstorms developed across the High Plains of Colorado and began moving out across parts of western Kansas and southern Nebraska. Some of these storms produced large hail, and tornadoes, with softball size (4.5inch diameter) in Kansas.
14th: The unseasonably cool spring continues along the East Coast of Massachusetts. Boston has waited longer than any other spring since records began to reach the 70F mark. The longest Boston had waited for a 70F temperature previously was May 14th, 1925.
14th: A week-long heat wave in the Indian state of Rajasthan has left 13 people dead from sun stroke. India's northern states, usually experience severe heat in summer months between April and June.
15th: Philippine civil-defence officials braced for an onslaught of mudflows from Mount Pinatubo after torrential rains threatened to flood villages around the volcano.
16th: Severe thunderstorms spawned 22 tornadoes across the USA and there were nearly 200 reports of large hail or damaging winds. Showers and thunderstorms deluged Saint Louis with 5.59 ins of rain making it the wettest May day of record.
16th: Temperatures above 47C in northern India killed at least 9 people today. This year, the temperature here has been above normal since the first week of May.
17th: Torrential rains that ended a five-month drought killed nearly 100 people and marooned 100,000 others in Bangladesh. 3 children were washed away by a 7-foot tidal wave off the coast of Cox's Bazar.
1st-17th: USA tornado count 1-17 May = 248 (normal for entire May = 183).
18th: More than fifty tornadoes were reported in the 12 hrs following sunrise, including 15 in Illinois, 10 in Tennessee, 8 in Kentucky and 5 in Missouri.
19th: 16th consecutive day with 90F or more at Tampa (a record for May).
22nd: Grapefruit size hail pummelled vehicles northeast of Pratt KS around 430 PM (CDT); then less than two hours later baseball size hail hit the area. Grapefruit size hail also hit west of Turon KS with softball size hail reported west of Wheeler TX.
22nd: Record-breaking temperatures as high as 112F degrees sparked brush fires in Israel. The heat wave, which began on Monday, was caused by a desert wind, according to Israel's weather service. In the Red Sea city of Eilat, temperatures reached 112F, a record for May. In Jerusalem, the temperature reached 99F, the highest on record for this day in May since a reading of 102 degrees in 1871.
23rd: The death toll in spring flooding in the Midwest rose to three as residents faced forecasts of more rain headed for the region. Floodwaters along the Mississippi and Missouri began to subside slightly after reaching a crest of 41.8 feet at the Gateway Arch in downtown St. Louis Monday. The record crest in St. Louis was set in 1993 and is just eight feet higher than the level recorded on Monday.
24th: India will probably have its eighth consecutive year of normal monsoon rains this year, the Indian Meteorological Department said on Thursday. "The country's monsoons will be 97 percent of the long period average value". United News of India (UNI) said the southwest monsoon set in over the Andaman Sea and its adjoining areas of the southern Bay of Bengal on May 15. The news agency said monsoon rains would set in over the southern state of Kerala about June 1.
27th: The rather stagnant weather pattern of May in the USA has been conducive to frequent heavy rains across parts of the plains and the Ohio River valley. During the past several weeks upper level disturbances have moved into parts of the SW U.S. and remained nearly stationary for a few days. Upper level disturbances rotate around the low and help to initiate thunderstorms with heavy rain. Record totals for May so far include 13.10ins at Evansville (old record 12.89ins), 11.07ins at Kansas City MO (11.00ins).
28th: In San Angelo TX a severe thunderstorm and tornado downed trees, destroyed cars and at least 60 people were injured. Grapefruit to softball size hail was reported.
30th: Moscow's international airport closed because the runway melted due to hot weather -- 90F in Moscow. Such heat is very unusual for late May. The heat has been blamed for at least three deaths and sent more than 20 people to hospitals with heat stroke.
31st: 33C in Moscow today. The highest ever temperature recorded in Moscow was 36.8 on Aug. 7, 1920. Tass said the hot dry weather was fanning forest fires in central and southern parts of the country, especially in the Rostov-on-Don and Volgograd areas.
31st: May was the hottest on record across Florida (eg a mean temp. of 28.6C at Key West was 0.4C higher than in 1967).
31st: 484 tornadoes in the USA in May; the average for May is 183.
31st: 12 were killed in Iran by flooding and lightning as torrential spring rains swept the country. In Khavarshahr, 9 miles southeast of Tehran, floods struck after an hour-long downpour. About 50 houses were destroyed by the floods.

World weather news, June 1995

1st: The new National Hurricane Center has been built withstand storm surge strong enough to hurl building parts and trees in 130 mph winds. Forecasters shielded by 10-inch concrete walls will be able to keep tracking the storm on their computer screens in the state-of-the-art facility. The building is well inland, 5 feet above the flood plain. If power's knocked out, there's enough in reserve for a week. The center also is getting a new director -- Robert W. Burpee. Burpee succeeds Bob Sheets, who retired last month.
2nd: Lightning struck a mosque in northern Bangladesh during a prayer service, killing the head priest. Four other worshippers were being treated for trauma at Kashidanga Village in Dinajpur district, 170 miles north of Dhaka.
3rd: Torrential rain in the last week of May in the south China province of Hunan left 22 dead, thousands homeless or marooned and cut transport links. More than 10,000 people have been left homeless and more than 10,000 marooned by the floodwaters, which affected a total of 1,385,000 people.
3rd: A heat wave with temperatures up to 120 degrees has killed at least 35 people this week in northern India. Friday was the hottest day this year in New Delhi at 114F.
3rd: Officials said one man had died and more than 2,000 people have been evacuated from areas in southeastern Norway flooded by melting snow and heavy rains. About 24,710 acres of farmland, one percent of Norway's arable land, have been flooded. Most damage was reported from Hedmark province where the swollen river Glomma has cut off roads, halted trains and isolated towns in the worst floods since water levels were first monitored in 1870.
3rd: Water rationing ended for thousands of San Juan (Puerto Rico) residents after days of rain filled the main reservoir. Authorities warned that restrictions could resume if drought returns.
4th: Thunderstorms over Texas produced softball size hail in several places
5th: Hurricane Allison drenched fishing villages and beach resorts on Florida's Gulf Coast Monday, then headed inland, leaving flooded roads, downed power lines and broken tree limbs in its path. Allison, which barely qualified as a hurricane with 75-mph maximum sustained winds, was the earliest hurricane to hit Florida on record.
5th: A wild thunderstorm with wind gusts topping 100 mph ripped through northern Utah, toppling trees and big-rig trucks and closing nearly 100 miles of interstate highway.
4th: The first of China's devastating annual floods has struck eastern Jiangxi province, killing nine people and 36,000 head of livestock and damaging thousands of homes and large tracts of rice. 11 days of heavy thunderstorms have dumped an average of 15 inches of rain on the Xin and Le'an river watersheds, more than double the normal average.
5th: Mexico's most damaging drought for decades has killed around 15 percent of national cattle stocks and also blighted crops. States bordering the United States, such as Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas, have not seen rain for between eight months and two years, depending on the zone.
5th: Three days of heavy rain caused by Hurricane Allison killed one person in a building collapse and damaged 32 buildings in Havana.
7th: Hundreds of people fled from their homes in western Canada after torrential rain flooded fast-moving Rocky Mountain rivers. One of the hardest-hit areas was the southern Alberta foothills community of Pincher Creek, about 125 miles south of Calgary, where homes are submerged and bridges damaged, but no injuries have been reported.
7th: A week of severe flooding appeared to ease in southeastern Norway, leaving some villages virtually wiped out and others as fortified as battlefields. Heavy rain and melting snow caused some of the area's worst floods of the century, sometimes sweeping along entire buildings as the water raged along a roughly 185-mile path from the mountains to the sea. One person died.
8th: The death toll in a scorching heatwave sweeping northern and western India has climbed to about 80 after 16 people died in the state of Uttar Pradesh.
9th: Supercell thunderstorms erupted over parts of Oklahoma and northwest Texas, near the intersection with a dryline. One supercell over southwest Oklahoma during early-mid afternoon spawned tornadoes and dropped two inch diameter hail.
13th: Very hot in the SW deserts of the USA, with 108F at Tucson AZ; these warm temperatures enhanced snowmelt across the higher elevations of the Rockies where recent snowfall has delayed spring runoff. As a result, many rivers and streams are near flood stage.
14th: The death toll in India's crippling heatwave has risen to 318. Temperatures as high as 120 degrees Fahrenheit have been recorded this summer in the desert state of Rajasthan. Temperatures routinely soar over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in much of northern India every year.
13th: It was the hottest day in June in Moscow for a century and the longest heatwave for more than two decades with average temperatures of 84.2F for the past three weeks. 86F was the highest June temperature since 86.2F in 1895. City officials said they were carrying out health checks at grocery stores and cafes. Two people with cholera have been taken to a hospital in Moscow. The Finns also took advantage of the baking temperatures to dive into the normally nippy Baltic Sea. The sun has shone so brightly in northern Lapland that some are forecasting a bumper crop of cloudberries, a rare fruit which is a local delicacy.
9th: In southern Alberta and parts of eastern British Columbia, floods fed by heavy rain and melting snow from the mountains were being described as the worst in nearly a century. In other areas the problem was just the opposite as fires consumed parched northern forests in Alberta, Saskatchewan, British Columbia, Manitoba and the Northwest Territories.
14th: An unusually strong upper level trough of low pressure located just off the California coast was expected to move inland across the southwestern portions of the USA. A moist onshore flow was already producing some light rain across much of the western portions of Oregon and California -- 0.08ins at Sacramento CA was a new record for the date.
10th: The lives of thousands of Swazis are threatened by a relentless drought.
13th: Heavy rains were reported from several parts of Kerala (India) as the Southwest Monsoon, which set in belatedly on the 10th, became active. In Ernakulam and Alapuzha districts, strong winds and rain damaged a few houses. Sea erosion, which usually precedes the monsoon, has affected a few hutments along the coast.
13th: High temperatures and low humidity have fueled the spread of wildfires in south-central and interior Alaska.
13th: Bangladesh, which suffered a severe drought in 1994, expects a near-normal monsoon this year, although heavy rains do not necessarily mean a good harvest.
14th: The 700,000 people of the area around the southern Spanish port of Cadiz have faced water restrictions for 8 to 10 hours a night since March 1992 to combat a sustained drought which has now become the worst of the century. Much of central and southern Spain has been hit by drought as the spring and autumn rains have failed to appear in the required volume year after year. Since serious records were started in 1912, the local Grazalema Range has had average rainfall of 84 inches a year. In 1991-92 it was 37 inches, the following year 39 inches and in 1993-94 a slightly better 47 inches. Rainfall from last October, when the hydrological year starts, to Feb. 20, 1995, was 24 inches -- less than half the average of 53 inches.
15th: Unseasonal weather in california: snow in the Sierra Nevada, rain in the San Francisco Bay, mist over Malibu. A late-season storm brought snow to the mountains near Lake Tahoe and the snowpack at Donner Summit was 4 feet, the third-deepest this late in the season this century.
17th: A strong upper level ridge of high pressure kept skies partly to mostly sunny across a large part of the upper Mississippi Valley and the Northern Plains. International Falls MN /which is also known as the icebox of the nation/ had its hottest day on record with 99F; the previous all time high temperature at International Falls was 98 degrees which was set on June 11th 1956, July 29th 1975 and July 6th 1988.
17th: Indian heatwave death-toll now 520. Most of northern India has been reeling under temperatures between 42 and 45C with some parts recording 50C since the heat wave began three weeks ago.
16th: Drought is threatening to damage grain crops as central Russia suffers its hottest early summer weather in about 100 years.
17th: Heavy rains and floodwaters sweeping in from India have inundated vast areas of northeastern Bangladesh, killing at least 31 people, with hundreds more missing.
18th: At least 24 people were killed and 14 others were missing in landslides caused by torrential rains in two remote districts of eastern Nepal.
20th: Record warmth was observed in parts of the Great Lakes region. while record cool temperatures were noted in the southeast and the San Joaquin Valley of California.
20th: Farmers in China's northwest Gansu province have given up hope for the summer harvest as crops wither under the province's worst drought in 60 years. More than 70 percent of the poverty-stricken province's farmland had been affected by the drought, with crops on 2.96 million acres in danger of being totally lost.
19th-23rd: Four days of torrential rains in western and central Cuba have caused three deaths, the evacuation of 5,000 people and damage to more than 5,000 homes.
23rd: Drought affecting most of China for the past six months has caused severe shortages of drinking water for people and animals and could cut crop output. Rainfall in most areas of the country since November has been 20-40 percent lower than average. In the north it has been up to 80 percent lower than average.
24th: Heavy rains across central and southern portions of the Florida peninsula only aggravated flooding from heavy rains of the past several days.
27th: Flash floods and landslides have killed 85 people and 41 are missing since heavy rains began battering the Himalayan kingdom three weeks ago.
27th: Eight people died trying to help those trapped by a landslide in central China, while flooding killed at least 77 others in the east and south.
27th: More than 3 inches of rain an hour submerged parts of Virginia, sweeping away cars and killing a man caught in swirling currents.
28th: A week of torrential rain has left more than 100 people dead and about 400,000 stranded in China's central Hunan province.
29th: Ireland's image of a land of rain and mist is looking a little frazzled. The nation is experiencing a Mediterranean-style heatwave. As temperatures reached 86 degrees Fahrenheit for the eighth consecutive day, newspapers carried articles advising this nation of 3.5 million how and when to use sun tan lotions.
29th: Lightning has killed 10 people in storms throughout Ukraine in the past week, including a woman and her grandson killed in a freak strike inside their home.
30th: Glacier National Park MT (USA) received 5.30 inches of rain during the month of June which breaks the record for the wettest June of record (4.72ins in 1966).
30th: 230 tornadoes in the USA in June (normal is 188).
30th: In southern New South Wales it was the coolest June in last five years.
30th: In Romania, baking heat by day is turning potholed streets into dustbowls, while in the evening they are being transformed into lakes under pounding rain. The picture was similar in Rome, where weather experts said the heat would not relent despite torrential rain. As France approached its 'Grand Depart,' the high vacation season when thousands take to the roads, temperatures soared to 90F. British water utilities warned of a possible ban on watering gardens until summer ends and urged customers to save water. (30th)
30th: China fears its worst flooding disaster this century with rising waters already killing hundreds of people and devastating farms and fisheries in its eastern region. Torrential rains have lashed the coast and set off mudslides and an official in Jiangxi province said Friday the death toll there now stood at 194 and was rising fast.
30th: Torrential rain has knocked out the sewage treatment system in Ukraine's second city of Kharkov, increasing the risk of infection in a country already in the grip of cholera, diphtheria and other diseases.
30th: A landslide spawned by thunderstorms dumped tons of mud on a highway Friday, killing at least 20 people and injuring 23 others, about 20miles east of Kuala Lumpur.
30th: In Skipton, northern England, a section of railroad track buckled in the heat, and had to be replaced. 'The rails can get as high as 110 degrees,' said a spokesman for British Rail.

World weather news, July 1995

3rd: Severe drought in northern China is threatening the water supply of more than nine million people and almost as many head of livestock.
3rd: Heavy rain triggered floods and landslides that killed at least five people and inundated more than 1,600 homes in southern and western Japan. More than 16 inches of rain fell since Friday in Saga, Kumamoto, Fukuoka and Oita prefectures on the southern island of Kyushu, and in parts of central Japan.
4th: India's Agriculture Ministry, worried over a delay in the onset of the monsoon in some parts of the country, will enforce contingency plans for crops if rains are inadequate.
4th: Parts of Colorado got an unexpected white Fourth of July as drifting snow and sleet clogged roads in the the Rocky Mountains.
5th: One million soldiers and civilians in China's southern Jiangxi province are fighting floods that have caused damage worth $1.17 billion. Floods have killed several hundred people in Jiangxi and at least 387 in the neighboring province of Hunan.
5th: Cars will be banned from the center of Athens Thursday in an effort to contain health risks from a heatwave coupled with dense smog.
5th: Floods caused by heavy rains have killed 17 people in northern Afghanistan's Takhar province.
4th: Torrential rain in Ghana killed at least 20 people and cut the West African country's telephone links with the outside world. Nine hours of rain early disrupted the West African country's telecommunications network and caused extensive damage in the capital Accra and surrounding towns, where drainage facilities were poor. 'The capital city of Accra and its surrounding towns and villages witnessed the worst flood in more than 50 years on Tuesday,'.
7th: Deaths from China's summer floods surged toward 1,200 with devastation in 10 provinces, crops ruined and economic losses put at $4.4 billion.
8th: Flooding has killed 17 people and trapped 1.5 million more in a week of torrential rains that have submerged more than 2,000 villages in northern Bangladesh.
11th: After nearly a week of clear skies and intense July sunshine... Temperatures across the plains soared to the highest levels of the current summer season...underneath a strong ridge of high pressure. Highs in excess of 110 degrees were recorded across portions of Kansas...with 100 plus degree heat common this afternoon from north central Texas into South Dakota.
10th: Three days of heavy rain in Turkey has killed at least 63 people and damaged almost 1,000 homes. The rain in Istanbul, where water seeped into hundreds of homes, was the heaviest for July in the last 62 years.
10th: Lightning killed one person and three were missing in floods as torrential rains disrupted train service and inundated hundreds of houses in central Korea.
12th: In the USA highs approaching or exceeding 110 degrees occurred across parts of central Kansas, Eastern Nebraska and western Iowa.
13th: Intense July sunshine warmed temperatures above 90 degrees across much of the nation east of the Rockies today...with numerous locations soaring above 100 degrees from the Central Plains into the western Great Lakes region...underneath a strong upper-level ridge of high pressure. 108F at was an all-time high there.
12th: Torrential rain swept through large parts of central and northern Japan Wednesday, flooding hundreds of homes, triggering landslides and disrupting road and rail traffic.
13th: Two days of heavy rains destroyed dozens of homes and forced more than 8,000 people into emergency shelters in central western Japan. The Central Meteorological Agency said almost 12 inches of rain had fallen on the three prefectures since late Tuesday, and eight to 14 inches more were expected Thursday in areas of north-central Japan, which includes Niigata.
13th: Hundreds of cattle have died of the heat in Iowa feedlots and farms in the 6-day-old hot spell over the center of the country. Many carcasses were decaying -- even bursting -- before trucks could haul them away to rendering plants. High humidity and temperatures over 100 degrees for the second day in a row combined for a deadly effect. The dew point climbed into the tropical 80s.
14th: The large dominating high pressure system responsible for the record heat over the central portions of the USA continues to shift eastward. Early this evening the high pressure was centered over the Ohio Valley. Beneath the high sinking air and mostly sunny skies helped temperatures soar well into the 90S with several locations reporting temperatures above 100 degrees. 101F at Flint MI was an all-time high.
15th: Hot weather continued to plague much of the eastern United States today as a large ridge of high pressure remained in place over the Tennessee Valley. 97F at Buffalo NY was a record for July.
16th: Record rainfall amounts were received in southern California today with Los Angeles reporting 0.02ins (old record for the 16th 0.01ins 1914) and San Diego reporting 0.05ins (0.04ins 1911).
17th: 11 people were struck by lightning in northern Florida. Six people were injured on the beach at Destin FL when one person was struck directly by a lightning bolt...the other five persons received shocks from the strike.
17th: Monsoon floods that have swept across nearly half of Bangladesh have killed 152 and marooned about 4 million in north Bangladesh since early this month.
18th: Months of drought have dried up a 385-mile stretch of northern China's mighty Yellow river, causing hardship for farmers living on its banks. Water had begun to flow again in some stretches of the river after heavy rains July 13.
18th: Monsoon-drenched India reports share prices up 7 percent over the past two wet weeks. Market confidence rises with assurances that rain aids crops in a land where nearly everyone depends on agriculture.
18th: Central England's Severn and Trent rivers have been hit by mass fish deaths. Muggy weather has de-oxygenated waters, then rain after prolonged drought has washed pollutants off roads into streams, killing thousands of fish.
18th: Poland has issued a health alert on an increase in blood-sucking ticks, which can carry diseases, in woods where Poles love to spend vacations. Some scientists attribute the rise to a series of mild winters.
17th or 18th: Some flooding in Dublin after three inches of rain fell in 45 minutes. The meteorological office called it 'phenomenal.'
20th: A heat wave in southern Spain has killed 111 people and sent another eight to the hospital in serious condition as temperatures rose above 104F. Temperatures touched 116 degrees Fahrenheit (on the 19th) in Seville and Cordoba.
19th: 752 deaths have been attributed to the USA heatwave and some severe storms, so far.
20th: Russia and the United States are talking about exchanging some of the mass of information collected by spy satellites -- in an effort to improve weather forecasts. Spy satellites tend to collect more-detailed information than the civilian versions used by the weather service.
20th: Shanghai's worst heatwave in almost 50 years has boosted ice-cream sales, wilted vegetables and pushed up prices. Temperatures soared to 101.3F on the 20th.
21st: A midsummer heatwave sparked a pollution alert in the Paris region for the second time in a month. 97F in Paris.
22nd: A heat-wave in southern Spain claimed two more lives, bringing the death toll to 14.
22nd: Flash floods have wreaked havoc in Pakistan's southern Sind province, killing at least 110 people and leaving hundreds more missing.
22nd: A lightning bolt killed 10 people searching for shellfish on a beach in southern Vietnam. Four other beachcombers were injured.
23rd: At least 22 people were missing, 15 were killed and an oil tanker ran aground when Typhoon Faye, packing winds of up to 95 miles an hour, hit southern South Korea. Press reports indicated that Faye may be the strongest typhoon to strike South Korea in almost 40 years.
23rd: Concentrated areas of thunderstorms extended across western Kansas and eastern Colorado in association with an eastward moving upper level trough of low pressure and a weak surface frontal boundary. Hail 2.75ins in diameter at Amarillo TX.
24th: Powerful thunderstorms with wind gusting to 97 mph at Oklahoma knocked out electricity to an estimated 59,000 customers and ripped the face off a warehouse.
25th: One person was killed and five others injured when a mini-tornado swept the Guerande peninsula in Loire-Atlantique, France.
26th: 124F at Death Valley (California).
27th: 125F at Death Valley (California).
26th-28th: At least 72 people have been killed in India's Jammu and Kashmir state after 3 days of heavy rain has brought floods and landslides.
28th: 126F at Death Valley and Thermal (California). 121F at Phoenix (Arizona), just 1F below all-time record.
29th: 127F at Death Valley (California).
29th: Floods and boiling mud slammed into villages in the northern Philippines after a tropical depression dumped torrential downpours in the area. No was reported killed or injured when a weather disturbance locally named 'Karing' caused flash floods and loosened tonnes of volcanic debris from the flanks of Pinatubo volcano.
29th: President Robert Mugabe declared a disaster in drought-stricken rural areas of Zimbabwe, saying his government needed to spend $250 million on food aid to save millions from hunger.
31st: The remnants of tropical storm Dean left a wet trail across Texas as it spun inland after dumping up to 15 inches of rain on parts of the Gulf Coast.
31st: The recent July month has been -again- very hot in the Netherlands. Last year July 1994 had the highest average temperatures since the start of the observations in 1706. July 1995 was the second warmest of this century (together with July 1983) and the fourth warmst since 1706. In De Bilt (near Utrecht) in the central part of the country the unofficial average temperature was 20.1 C (last year 21.4 C).
31st: UK Met Office said that July 1995 was the third hottest on record.
31st: 170 tornadoes reported in the USA in July -- normal is 103.
31st: In Greece, 15,000 acres of parched forest outside Athens burned earlier this month. More than 25 homes and other buildings on Mount Pendelikon were destroyed. Italian authorities have issued warnings as pollutions levels rise, especially in Rome -- at least nine deaths have been blamed on weeks of relentless heat that has hovered around 100 degrees at times. In Poland, temperatures have hit an unusually scorching 88F this month. The transportation minister suggested banning large trucks to protect softened roads.

World weather news, August 1995

1st: Winds up to 60 mph brought on by Tropical Storm Gary lashed the Taiwan Straits, which separate Taiwan from mainland China. Four storm-related deaths were reported in Shantou, a port on China's southern coast 190 miles northeast of Hong Kong.
1st: Bookmakers William Hill have cut their odds on Britain experiencing a temperature of 100 F this year to 10-1 from 14-1.
1st: A breed of giant greenfly four times the normal size is plaguing Scotland, while swarms of ladybirds are expected to descend on eastern England. Scientists are also warning that the hot weather makes wasps more likely to sting.
1st: Jamaican officials blamed Hurricane Erin for a twin-engine plane crash that killed five people.
2nd: Hurricane Erin slammed into the East Coast of Florida near Vero Beach early this morning...producing strong winds and torrential rainfall. Widespread flooding made many roads impassible. Erin weakened to a tropical storm as it tracked across the peninsula. 8.55 ins fell at Melbourne, Florida.
4th: Today was the 24th consecutive day with a max temperature of at least 90F at Baltimore, Maryland (a record sequence).
5th-6th: Three to seven inches of rain has fallen over portions of northern Vermont since Saturday morning.
6th: Today was the 27th consecutive day with a max temperature of at least 90F at Richmond, Virginia (a record sequence).
5th-6th: Five Italians died after being struck by lightning in a weekend of electrical storms in northern Italy. A train travelling from the French city of Nice to Milan was also hit by lightning near Milan late Sunday night.
7th: Although rains have eased, dozens of towns and villages in northeastern China remained submerged under 10 feet of water. At least 123 people have died, while in Liaoning and Jilin provinces 1 million people have been relocated since heavy rains began two weeks ago. The homes of nearly 400,000 people were destroyed.
9th: Heavy rains and flooding in parts of Ohio, Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana, with over 10ins in 24hrs in Ohio, and one person reported killed.
9th: Two weeks of broiling temperatures in Southern California's Imperial Valley have killed at least 16 people, many of them elderly. Temperatures have reached at least 112F each day, and once reached 124F, the hottest ever recorded in the region 120 miles east of San Diego.
9th: In Jhall Magsi in southwestern Baluchistan province (Pakistan), a powerful torrent of water several days before had turned home after home into mounds of mud and made an already dirt poor village even poorer. Monsoon rains followed by floods have wreaked havoc throughout the country and left at least 600 people dead. The hardest hit areas have been southern Punjab province and vast tracts of the province of Sindh.
10th: Nine villagers from Yebra drowned in a torrent of mud and water and a driver crashed his truck and died during storms in central Spain overnight.
10th: Four people were killed when a tornado ripped through Shanghai, toppling a construction crane and tearing the roof off a factory in China's largest city. The tornado was accompanied by thunderstorms, hailstones and torrential rain when it hit the city late Thursday afternoon.
11th: A small tornado hit the French Riviera, injuring about 30 people, uprooting trees and triggering flash floods, officials said. The freak storm struck just east of the port of Marseille at La Ciotat and nearby Saint-Cyr-Sur-Mer.
11th: A storm with wind gusting to 76 mph dumped hail and more than 3 inches of rain on Tucson, Arizona, causing flash floods that killed at least one person and left 11 motorists stranded in raging waters.
12th: Temperatures in the upper 90s killed two more people in the Chicago area, bringing to 570 the number of people who have died from the heat this summer.
13th: Three people drowned in a flash flood while 'canyoning' near the southern French Alpine resort of Beuil. A huge wave swept down the canyon after a rainstorm. Sixteen other people were hauled to safety by helicopters and some of them were treated for shock. All were practising 'canyoning,' the latest craze in the French Alps which mixes abseiling, swimming and canoeing down canyons.
12th-13th: Tropical Storm Helen killed 23 people and affected more than five million when it battered south China's Guangdong province at the weekend. Heavy rain and strong winds swept across eight cities in the province leaving a trail of destruction with economic losses estimated at 1.33 billion yuan (US$160 million).
14th: A mass of mud dislodged by heavy rains slid onto a major Swiss highway, leaving a 500-foot stretch of the busy road blocked near Montreux with muck, rock and debris up to 13 feet deep. Eight people were injured.
14th: Continuing very hot weather under an upper level ridge of high pressure anchored over the southeastern U.S. 103F at Columbia, S Carolina.
15th: 103F at Apalachicola FL was the all-time record high for that site, breaking the old record of 102F set in 1932. Also, this was only the third time on record that Apalachicola has reached the century mark.
16th: Record heat continued across much of the southeastern U.S.. Heat advisories have been posted for many locations.
16th: Barely six months after widespread flooding in the south of Holland sent 250,000 people fleeing from their homes farmers say that livestock are running out of fodder, while maize and potato crops wither in the heat. This year's scorching summer, with its weeks of seemingly endless blue skies, hot sun and low rainfall is drying out land in the sandy south and causing big problems for farmers.
16th: With weeks of cloudless skies, no rain and temperatures hovering around 30C, Britain is experiencing its driest summer since 1728. Experts say it is the third-hottest spell since records began to be kept in 1659. Millions of Britons face restrictions on water usage.
16th: 29C at Aberdeen, Scotland, was the highest temperature ever recorded there.
17th: Searing temperatures have killed nearly 1 million chickens over the last week in Alabama poultry houses. The oppressive heat of the last seven days has killed almost three times the number of chickens that died during the entire month of July.
22nd: Norfolk (Nebraska, USA) received 5.06 inches of rain and set a new 24 hour rainfall record for the month of August; old record stood at 2.57ins.
16th-18th: Chile declared a state of catastrophe in its southernmost region after the heaviest snowfalls in 40 years cut off villages and killed hundreds of thousands of livestock.
18th: Thunderstorms and torrential rain have swept Italy at the height of the holiday season, killing at least two people, damaging crops and causing flooding in the usually parched south of the country.
17th-18th: 230 people were killed and 500 missing in flooding following torrential rains which struck mountain areas near the Moroccan city of Marrakesh. Morocco has been suffering from severe drought this year, leaving parched lands prone to flooding. Much of the country is in the grips of a severe heatwave, with temperatures in some parts reaching 50C.
17th-18th: Heavy rain and high tides have caused floods in large parts of North Korea. 4--6 ins. of rain fell in Kyangwon prefecture around the Chongchon and Taedong rivers, and 14 ins in Huichon.
17th-18th: A river that burst its banks swept 44 people to their deaths and left some 2,500 people homeless in northern Ethiopia. The flooding struck in the town of Magete, in the Amhara region, when most residents were asleep.
21st: The Australian city of Sydney is experiencing its driest spell since records began 137 years ago. Temperatures have risen 10degC above average to 26C. Sydney has not received any rain for 35 days -- the longest spell on record.
21st: Floods sweeping Bangladesh for the second time in two months have killed at least 20 people, left 50,000 homeless and damaged crops and property worth millions of dollars.
23rd: Ireland, a nation of rain and mist, is facing a water crisis after months of rare and uninterrupted sunshine.
23rd: Hundreds of Britain's swans are dying because weeks of drought have sent bacteria levels soaring in ponds and rivers. More than 1,000 swans have died of botulism in the past two weeks.
23rd: The mercury topped 30C in Tokyo for the 32nd consecutive day, breaking a 101-year old record. The prolonged hot spell began soon after the annual rainy season lifted in late July. Parched Tokyoites struggling to keep cool have been flocking to public swimming pools, which have set out large blocks of ice cut into the shape of chairs for children to sit on.
25th: Canterbury (New Zealand) has gone from a colder than average winter to extreme warmth. Maximum on the 24th was 22C close to the absolute record for August. An interesting side effect is that Daffodil Day for cancer research on the 25th had to import 100000 daffodils from Australia for the first time because the cold winter had so delayed flowering despite the near record warmth of the last few weeks. On the 25th there was fresh snow on the local hills and a max. of just 9C.
26th: The circulation that used to be tropical storm Jerry continued to dump heavy rains and aggravate flooding problems today across portions of the southeast USA.
27th: Greenville/Spartenburg (South Carolina) recorded 9.32 ins of rain from the remnants of `Jerry' -- the heaviest 24-hr fall on record.
29th: Bombay officials are considering imposing either a 20 percent cut in water supplies or turning off supplies completely for one day a week to India's commercial capital, a city of 12 million people. Officials in the state of Maharashtra, of which Bombay is the capital, said on Tuesday the cuts would be essential if the region did not get adequate monsoon rains in the next few days. They said it had been one of the driest phases in the past century.
25th: South Korea, already swamped by three days of torrential downpours that left at least 17 people dead, battened down for the arrival of Typhoon Janis. Nationwide train services were virtually paralyzed as sections of major trunk lines were buried by landslides or submerged by flood waters. Disaster officials said nearly 200 people have been injured as parts of South Korea have been turned into 'a sea of floods' by up to 440 mm of rain.
25th-26th: Five people were killed and power and telephone lines cut in severe flooding in northern Albania. Heavy storms turned a mountain stream into a torrent near the town of Lezha, 50 miles north of Tirana.
26th: The threat from a tropical storm ebbed Saturday but the Caribbean island of Montserrat remained in a state of high alert as its rumbling volcano showed increased activity.
27th: South Korea welcomed clear skies Sunday after four days of torrential rains that killed at least 41 people and flooded tens of thousands of acres farmland. The downpours, along with Typhoon Janis, dumped as much as 25 inches of rain on parts of South Korea, submerging 70,000 acres of farmland.
27th: 'Osprey 1' -- the first commercial wave-powered electricity generator -- is slowly sinking into the Atlantic under a pounding from a late summer storm. The controversial and experimental generator, put into place earlier this month amid big publicity, was damaged by gentle summer swells within weeks.
28th: Flooding caused by up to 15 inches of rain forced hundreds of people from their homes in the Carolinas and drowned six people, including a fireman trying to make a rescue and an 8-year-old skateboarder.
28th: Unusual tides and hot weather killed an estimated 50 million fish in a Texas river. A solid layer of dead fish covered a three-mile stretch of the Colorado River on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, 90 miles southwest of Houston. Tests of the river water showed low oxygen levels that were likely caused by the hot summer sun and lack of tidal movement to flush in new, oxygen-rich water.
28th: Typhoon Janis, which swept through the southern half of the Korean peninsula last weekend, left 45 people dead and nine missing.
29th: Two hurricanes and two tropical storms churned through the Atlantic Tuesday, posing little threat to land but making the first three months of the 1995 Atlantic hurricane season the busiest in 62 years.
30th: Over 60,000 people fled walls of boiling mud as heavy rains from typhoon Kent unleashed mudflows from Pinatubo volcano in the northern Philippines.
30th: Very warm and extremely dry conditions have been prevalent across much of the northeastern United States this month from New Jersey to Connecticut. Many locations across this area have experienced an 11 to 13 inch rain deficit during the past eight months. This has prompted a ban on open fires across much of this region...and a drought warning is in effect for northern New Jersey until further notice.
31st: Pittsburgh PA observed their second warmest August...and their fifth warmest month on record. August 1995 will go into the record books as the warmest month in Pittsburgh in ninety-four years.
30th: The almonds are shrivelled and black, the apricot trees have no leaves, let alone fruit, and the cherry trees have been given up as lost and cut down. The whole of southern Spain is suffering its fifth year of drought but the southeast corner of Murcia, one of the main fruit and vegetable producing regions, is desperately dry. This year's rainfall is likely to be the lowest on record and despairing farmers are contaminating their land with salt-laden underground water.
30th: Tropical storm Lois, which swept into northern Vietnam from the South China Sea this week, flooded rice crops but appeared to have left people unscathed.
30th: Hong Kong people rushed to video stores and groceries to stock up on supplies as intense typhoon Kent approached. The government raised typhoon signal No. 8, a warning this normally bustling commercial centre should shut down tightly in advance of punishing rains and hurricane-force winds. Kent killed at least five people in the Philippines.
31st: Six people were killed and two are missing after flash floods hit the northeastern Turkish province of Rize. Streams swollen by two hours of heavy rain damaged houses and swept five vehicles into the Black Sea.
31st: Typhoon Kent stormed across southern China, killing 47 people and injuring at least nine as it toppled hundreds of banana trees. The typhoon, the second to batter southern China in less than a week, killed at least 30 people in southern Guangdong province.
31st: August was a very active hurricane month in the Atlantic and Carribean. 7 tropical storms formed for only the second time since records began in 1871. Only the year 1933 equalled this record, which was the most active season overall with 21 storms.

World weather news, September 1995

2nd

A large ridge of high pressure, abundant sunshine and warm air resulted in record September temperatures in SE USA, including 100F at Lake Charles LA and 97F at Apalachicola FL.

2nd

4.5 inch diameter hail at Lincoln, Nebraska, USA.

4th

100F at Grand Junction CO and 97F at Denver CO were records for September in the USA.

2nd-4th

Fast-rising floodwaters and hot volcanic debris unleashed by Tropical Storm Nina have forced 33,000 people to flee their homes in the northern Philippines. Since Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991, more than a hundred villages in the provinces of Pampanga, Tarlac and Zambales have been erased from the map by subsequent avalanches of volcanic debris.

4th

Hurricane Henriette battered tourist resorts in the west coast of the Mexican state of Baja California. There were sustained winds of 100 mph and gusts of up to 120 mph.

1st-4th

Three days of heavy monsoon rains have killed nearly 40 people and flooded hundreds of villages in four northern Indian states and parts of New Delhi.

5th

Hurricane Luis battered Montserrat in a path of destruction expected to skip across a half-dozen Caribbean islands. Luis, classified as a deadly storm with sustained winds of 140 mph by the National Hurricane Center, appeared to be gathering strength as it began lashing the Caribbean's Leeward Islands.

5th

A warm ridge of high pressure in the middle and upper levels of the atmosphere has dominated the weather across much of the Rockies and Plains for the past week. 103F at Amarillo TX was a record for September.

5th

The Indian death-toll from floods and landslides caused by recent heavy monsoon rains rose to over 100. (5th)

5th

Tourists rushed to catch flights out of Puerto Rico and residents combed stores for emergency supplies as Hurricane Luis closed in on the island.

6th

Damage reports in the Carribean as of the 6th from hurricane Luis - Antigua and Barbuda devasted, two hotels were washed away, a nightclub was flattened and hundreds of homes were damaged. Damage estimated at $300 million. St Vincent and the Grenadines: high seas forced the closure of Port Kingstown and St. Vincent Airport. British Virgin Islands: the storm blew roofs off some buildings in Fahie, north of Tortola. Winds clocked at 130 mph in Anguilla after dark, knocking out power and phones. St Maarten: winds of up to 120 mph toppled trees onto main roads. No telephone service or electricity on either side of the island. 8 people killed. Ham radio reports said high swells pounded the coast of Marigot and Phillipsburg. Dominca: Unconfirmed reports also indicated that Dominica suffered extensive losses in its banana crop, the country's main source of revenue.

6th

North Korea said that 'unprecedented' torrential floods last month killed at least 68 people and caused damage worth US$15 billion.

6th

Italy's winemakers have been forced to lower their production targets for the second consecutive year after an August of torrential rain damaged grape crops. An unusually dry summer damaged grape crops in 1994 and led to a poor season for the wine industry.

7th

Flash floods apparently triggered by massive landslides that plunged into a lake killed at least 15 people. The raging waters destroyed hundreds of houses around Lake Maughan, near the town of Tiboli in South Cotabato province (Philippines), and many people were reported missing.

7th

Monsoon season floods have killed 29 people in north India, driven 50,000 people from riverside slums in Delhi, and trapped thousands more in districts threatened by rising waters.

7th

Effects of hurricane Luis on the 7th:

Anguilla:: the British destroyer HMS Southampton arrived at Anguilla on Thursday to offer relief aid. Squads of Caribbean soldiers and police were also being dispatched.
Antigua and Barbuda:: the American Red Cross reported that at least 2,230 people were homeless, 1,500 homes were destroyed and 5,000 houses lost their roofs. Telephone, electricity and water lines were still out of service. The airport in St. John's was still closed to commercial traffic.
St Barthelemy:: Luis tore down the airport terminal building and flung the pieces onto the runway, leaving too many obstacles for planes to land. The pier at the harbor was swept away by high seas churned by the hurricane. Radio Caribe Internationale reported the banana crop was a write-off and the sugar cane crop was severely damaged.
St Kitts-Nevis:: estimated damage to the island is $149 million. One-quarter of the schools sustained severe damage to their structures and equipment.
St Maarten:: officials confirmed nine deaths and 1,500-2,000 people left homeless. 'There was so much damage that it's impossible to make an assessment,'

8th

Jackson (Kentucky) recorded 90F, for the 41st time this year (a record number).

8th

Hurricane Luis affected the Leeward Islands, Bermuda, and southeastern Newfoundland. A reconnaissance aircraft reported a minimum pressure of 935 mb at 2352 UTC 7 September. Luis caused major damage on the Leeward Islands from Antigua to St. Martin, with lesser damage reported elsewhere from Martinique to Puerto Rico. Sixteen people have been reported killed so far, with 9 of those occurring on St. Martin. Monetary damage figures are incomplete, but estimates on Antigua alone are $300 million.

8th

Rescue workers in the southern Philippines found 11 more bodies Friday, bringing the death toll from flash floods this week to 26. At least 117 others remained missing.

8th

Monsoon rains blanketed northern India, sending flood waters surging into the slums of New Delhi and raising the death toll in a week of flooding to more than 400 people.

11th

Lightning struck radar at Dublin airport twice overnight, delaying flights.

12th

Rains triggered landslides in northern India and buried at least 70 people near the town of Kulu.

12th

Extensive flooding across large parts of Thailand, with the north and northeast particularly badly affected, has killed at least 100 people. The ministry of agriculture said damage to crops was estimated at $160 million.

12th

Tropical Storm Marilyn, the 13th named storm of the prolific 1995 Atlantic hurricane season, formed off the Windward Islands.

13th

Honduran President Carlos Roberto Reina said Wednesday that disaster had struck his country after weeks of floods washed away 900 homes, killed 23 people and destroyed thousands of acres of vital food crops.

13th

New York and New Jersey imposed emergency measures to save water Wednesday as the Northeast battled a drought that dried up rivers and streams, parched crops and livestock and sparked dangerous brush fires.

15th

The luxury British liner QE2 was hit by a tidal wave as it crossed the Atlantic, its captain said. The 95-foot wave, caused by the seas being whipped up by Hurricane Luis, hit the ship bows-on. Minor repairs were carried out on the liner when it arrived eight hours behind schedule in New York.

15th

Hurricane Ismael was downgraded to a tropical storm after claiming at least 91 lives along Mexico's Pacific coast.

16th

One of the most powerful storms to hit Japan since World War II churned north along the nation's eastern islands, buffeting them with heavy rain and 110-mph winds. 2 people were killed by Typhoon Oscar. Miyake, an island south of Tokyo, had received 12 inches of rain in 36 hours by early Sunday.

17th

A weakened Hurricane Marilyn churned north toward the open waters of the Atlantic, leaving at least four dead and hundreds homeless after slamming the U.S. Virgin Islands in the Caribbean. Officials said some 70 to 80 percent of the buildings on St. Croix and St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands were damaged.

18th

Work at Malaysia's biggest electronics manufacturing centre in Penang came to a near standstill after heavy floods kept thousands of workers at home. Continuous rain over the weekend covered parts of Pengang with water up to three metres (nine feet) deep, forcing the closure of many schools, government and businesses, the officials said.

19th

A thick haze blanketed much of Singapore, blotting out the normally fierce tropical sun at noon and raising fears of a return of severe air pollution that hit the island in August 1994. A spokesman for the Singapore Meteorological Service said the haze had started to appear Monday and was probably caused by smoke blown across from parts of central and southern Sumatra in nearby Indonesia.

20th

An upper level trough of low pressure brought up to 10ins of snow to Wyoming, USA.

21st

Northeast winds forced up the higher terrain generated snow from southeastern Wyoming into northeast portions of New Mexico, east into portions of Kansas. Nearly 18ins fell in parts of Colorado.

22nd

A cold surface high pressure system brought all-time low September tempertures to parts of the USA, including 29F at Concordia KS and Dodge City KS, 26F at Hastings NE, 21F at Pierre SD.

23rd

32F at Parkersburg WV was a record low for September, as a cool cool high pressure system has settled over the Ohio Valley.

22nd

Four people were killed and two children were missing as Typhoon Ryan wreaked havoc in Taiwan and the Philippines.

22nd

Four people were killed, roads were blocked and power and phone lines cut in northern and western Albania in the heaviest rains in the past 15 years. Water levels rose to four feet in the southwestern district of Lushnja and interior ministry helicopters flew to the area to rescue people clinging to the roofs of houses.

24th

An elderly woman was killed and an American boy was missing when Typhoon Ryan swept through southwestern Japan. Hundreds of homes were flooded and landslides were reported as parts of the Chugoku region and the island of Shikoku recorded falls of up to 70 mm rain per hour. One area in Miyazaki prefecture on Kyushu had more than 360 mm of rainfall as of Sunday morning.

24th

A Philippine senator urged a ban on the use of women's names identifying typhoons, saying it gives a stereotyped picture of women as destructive.

24th

Floods have killed at least seven people in the West African state of Benin and made thousands homeless in Benin and Togo. Up to 30,000 people had been forced from their homes in Benin while officials in neighboring Togo said at least 25,000 people had been made homeless there. No deaths were reported in Togo. The floods were triggered when heavy rain caused rivers to burst their banks in the southwest, near the border with Togo.

26th

At least 11 children and an old woman have drowned in floods in two Mekong Delta provinces. About 15,000 houses were under water, 10,000 families had been evacuated and 50,000 families were short of food, the reports from Ho Chi Minh City said. The floods, an annual scourge during the rainy season in Mekong River catchment areas, cut roads and submerged rice paddies in An Giang and Dong Thap provinces adjoining the Cambodian border, west of Vietnam's biggest city.

27th

Six people were killed and about 5,000 more were made homeless as rivers burst their banks and flooded villages in El Salvador. The country's two main hydroelectric dams have been filled to the brim in the heavy rains of recent days. Vegetable and grain crops also suffered heavy damage.

29th

About 70 people have been killed and thousands made homeless this week in floods caused by torrential rains in eastern India, officials said.

29th

Some 50 people died in the past three days in the eastern A landslide triggered by a tropical storm killed 18 people. The landslide happened in the southern town of Cagayan de Oro as Tropical Storm Cybil swept inland.

30th

Some 4,000 people were evacuated from their homes in western Cuba after heavy rain damaged houses and crops, toppled power lines and flooded roads and railway tracks.

World weather news, October 1995

1st: Tropical Storm Cybil slammed into the heart of the Philippines before dawn, cutting a wide swath of destruction. The death toll stood at 28. Packing winds of up to 60 mph, the storm caused widespread flooding that displaced thousands of residents. Winds toppled trees and electric posts, rendering many areas in Luzon, the country's biggest island, without electricity or phones.
1st: Bangladesh sent in the army to assist rescue operations in the north of the country, where nearly 150 people have been killed in five days of floods caused by heavy rains.
1st: Flirting with the shoreline, Tropical Storm Opal flooded Mexico's eastern states with heavy rains, closing fishing and commercial ports on the nation's Gulf Coast.
3rd: The Gulf Coast from Louisiana to the Florida Panhandle was put under hurricane watch as Hurricane Opal inched northward. In its wake, heavy winds, high surf and floodwaters left at least 10 people dead and 20 missing in Mexico.
4th: Rain fell from the central Gulf Coast to New York as Hurricane Opal lashed the Florida Panhandle with heavy rain and flooding. Winds gusted to 144mph.
5th: As Hurricane Opal weakened after ravaging the Florida Panhandle, Tropical Storm Pablo was born far off in the Atlantic in an area that has bred some of this season's most dangerous storms. Pablo reached the 39 mph threshold to become the 16th named storm of one of the busiest Atlantic hurricane seasons on record. Earleire, Opal had killed 20 in the US.
9th: Flooding, which has already claimed some 70 lives in Vietnam's southern Mekong Delta, spread to the country's central provinces swamping parts of the ancient city of Hue. Reports gave few details but said prolonged torrential rain in upstream areas of the Perfume River had led to floodwaters of up to 3.3 feet in Hue city.
9th: Heavy rains and flooding in Nicaragua have killed 11 people and left more than 2,000 families homeless in the past week. The heaviest damage might not be felt for several weeks or months because of the loss of basic grain crops like corn and beans. Besides property damage, public health dangers persist because the flooding creates breeding grounds for mosquitos that carry malaria and dengue fever.
10th: Hurricane Roxanne headed for the Yucatan Peninsula with 105 mph winds, threatening Mexico with its second natural disaster this week. A powerful earthquake shook Mexico's Pacific Coast on Monday, killing dozens. Roxanne menaced the same area where what later became Hurricane Opal came ashore last week, dumping heavy rains and killing at least 10 people in Mexico.
11th: More than 1,100 medical teams spread out across 14 Bangladesh districts, much of it still under water, to tackle a diarrhoea epidemic that has pushed the flood death toll up past 400, local officials said. The officials said nearly 50,000 people were suffering from diarrhoea after drinking floodwater or eating rotten food.
11th: Hurricane Roxanne cut Mexico's idyllic resort island of Cozumel off from the world as it charged across the Yucatan toward the Gulf of Mexico, where it was expected to regain strength before coming back to land.
12th: Global warming could seriously harm yields of rice, the staple food of up to two billion people in Asia, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines said. IRRI said in a statement a study showed rice plants could benefit from higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but an increase in temperature by up to four degrees centigrade would 'nullify any yield increase'.
12th: The death toll from flooding in central and southern Vietnam has risen to more than 120. The worst affected province was An Giang on the southern border with Cambodia where 46 people have been killed since floods caused by annual monsoon rains began in September. Newspapers said the flooding was the worst to hit central areas in 16 years.
12th: Insured property damage from Hurricane Opal was estimated at $2.1 billion by Property Claim Services, an insurance industry organization that tracks losses. That estimate, which is just slightly higher than an earlier estimate provided by another insurance group, makes Opal the third most costly hurricane in U.S. history behind Andrew and Hugo. Opal struck the Florida Panhandle on Oct. 4 as a Category 3 hurricane with winds around 125 mph.
13th: Thousands of Mexicans fled from torrential rains and battering winds as Tropical Storm Roxanne rumbled across the Gulf of Mexico heading toward the coast.
13th: President Clinton declared flood-soaked parts of southcentral Alaska a federal disaster area. The flooding resulted from heavy September rains linked to Typhoon Oscar. The floods damaged roads, bridges and hundreds of homes and buildings, forcing evacuations in some rural areas.
14th: Roxanne moved back up to hurricane status and threatened to burst onto Mexico's eastern coast, where it has already left thousands homeless, cut off roads and flooded swathes of farmland.
17th: Rainstorms have left at least 46 people dead, marooned 30,000 and washed away 10,000 livestock in the southwest China region of Guangxi, the China News Service reported. It is rare for Guangxi to have rain during October, let alone such fierce storms, it said.
17th: Rescue boats plucked 15 survivors Tuesday from the Gulf of Mexico after a barge sank in a hurricane, and the U.S. Coast Guard said the toll has risen to five dead. But Roxanne, downgraded from hurricane to tropical storm status with sustained winds of 65 mph Tuesday, continued to torment tens of thousands of people by pushing the sea far above its normal level, destroying homes and belongings with the worst flooding near Cuidad del Carmen, Mexico since 1927.
17th: Computer models predict steadily worsening droughts in southern Africa as the effects of global warming accumulate, the World Wide Fund for Nature said. It said Zimbabwe, Namibia, Botswana and South Africa could all be affected by increasingly severe water shortages, according to the computer projections.
18th: Moisture from Tropical Storm Roxanne brought rain to Texas and prolonged widespread flooding in southern Florida on, sending alligators onto residential streets.
18th: Tropical Storm Roxanne, once a powerful hurricane, was petering out after flooding much of Mexico's Gulf coast and damaging the area's banana and cattle business. Over the past three weeks, hurricanes Opal and Roxanne have ravaged the southern coast of the Gulf of Mexico. The states of Chiapas, Quintana Roo, Yucatan, Campeche, Tabasco have suffered heavy damage.
12th-18th: As much as 24 inches of rain have fallen on southern Florida this week, flooding neighborhoods, closing streets and causing millions of dollars in damages to homes and businesses.
20th: Tropical Storm Sebastien, the year's 18th named storm, was about 355 miles east of the Lesser Antilles.
23rd: The first big storm of the season blew heavy snow across the western Plains, with wind up to 56 mph piling it into drifts 4 feet deep, and roads and schools were closed from Colorado into South Dakota. Nearly 2 feet of snow fell Sunday in South Dakota's Black Hills and in Utah's mountains.
23rd: The airport that was supposed to keep America's flights on time in any kind of weather failed the test during its first blizzard. A storm that dumped 6ins of snow crippled the new Denver International Airport. Snow and rain leaked through the tower roof and fell on computer equipment.
25th: A car ferry broke its moorings in high winds and went aground with 58 crew aboard in Rosslare as Ireland and Britain suffered the first storms of winter.
25th: The unusual climate conditions that disrupted the last few winters in the USA appear to be over. Sea-surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean have cooled toward normal, ending the persistent climate disruption known as El Nino that had plagued weather worldwide, NOAA researchers said.
25th: A violent snowstorm crippled Iceland Wednesday, closing roads, tearing down electricity pylons and triggering avalanches. The Keflavik international airport was closed because of high winds. Early winter storms are relatively common in Iceland. Police said most rural roads were closed by the snow storm and an avalanche destroyed a garbage disposal plant at Isafjordur in northwestern Iceland. On Sunday, two passengers died when violent gusts of wind blew a bus off a road in the remote north.
27th: More than 10,000 Cambodians have been forced to flee their homes after heavy floods in northwest districts which have also raised concerns over the rice harvest. The death toll from the floods was put at 14.
27th: Tropical Storm Tanya, the 19th of the second-busiest hurricane season on record, emerged in the mid-Atlantic. Only 1933 had more recorded tropical storms, with a total of 21, according to the hurricane center. That was before hurricane forecasters assigned names to Atlantic storms.
28th: More than half the Thai capital Bangkok was inundated with floodwater as the Chao Phraya river reached its highest level in decades. Most low-lying areas of western Bangkok had already become flooded in the last few days. By noon on Saturday the Chao Phraya river had reached 2.27 metres above sea level -- the highest seen in decades, the flood prevention official said. In 1983, when floods indundated nearly all of Bangkok, the water measured 2.13 metres. The flooding is reported to have cost more than 10 billion baht ($400 million) in damage to farms, livestock and fisheries.
29th: Tropical storm Zack moved away from the central Philippines, leaving at least 163 people dead in its wake and tens of thousands more homeless. Zack, the 13th tropical storm to approach the Philippines this year, moved Sunday into the South China Sea.
29th: Weeks of dry and stagnant weather in Italy have pushed pollution rates to unhealthy levels. Downtown areas of Bologna, Udine and other cities were closed to traffic during the weekend. Officials in Naples and Modena announced similar steps for Monday. The Environmental League activist group distributed 'smog-eating' plants and special white sheets that display the amount of pollutants in the air.
30th: Tanya, the Atlantic's 11th hurricane this year, spun harmlessly in the ocean Monday east of Bermuda and was considered no threat to land.
31st: A new typhoon bore down on the Philippines three days after tropical storm Zack ravaged the country. The weather bureau said in a bulletin that Typhoon Angela was threatening the country's main island of Luzon as it moved in from the Pacific with top winds of 87 mph.
31st: Britain has had the warmest year since records began. Official figures showed that in the 12 months from Nov. 1 1994 the average temperature was 11.2 C. This was the highest figure since readings were first taken in 1659.

World weather news, November 1995

1st: President Fidel Ramos ordered government agencies on 24-hour full alert as super-typhoon Angela approached the Philippines.
1st: Large areas of flood-struck central Vietnam were counting the cost of further damage as typhoon Zack moved deeper into Indochina. As many as 80 people have died here.
1st: Ten people were killed overnight in two road accidents near Melun (40 miles SE of Paris, France) blamed on thick fog that cut visibility.
2nd: Super-typhoon Angela hammered the Philippines' Bicol region on Thursday, damaging about 10,000 houses and forcing tens of thousands of people to flee.
2nd: Tropical storm Tanya whipped the mid-Atlantic Azores Islands, causing power cuts and damage to buildings and boats on five of the nine islands.
2nd: The first snowstorm of the season caught Moscow off guard after an unusually long and sunny autumn. At least four people died, three of the cold and the other in a weather-related traffic accident.
3rd: Economic growth in the Philippines may be stunted by a string of typhoons that have inflicted damage on crops, reigniting fears of a surge in inflation, officials and analysts said.
3rd: At least 10 people were killed and three reported missing when super-typhoon Angela pounded the main Philippine island of Luzon. More than 200,000 people fled their homes because of Angela, which packed winds of up to 270 kph (167 mph) when it hit Luzon's southeastern coast.
3rd: Rescue workers recovered the body of one crew member and were searching for seven others after a small freighter sank in a storm off southern Norway.
3rd: Prompt action by the crew averted disaster when a ferry carrying 81 passengers from Sweden to Germany developed a severe list in heavy storms in the southern Baltic Sea. The ferry Sassnitz began to heel after gales and heaving waves tipped several railway carriages over on the vehicle deck and cars began to roll and slide to one side of the ship.
4th: Unusually cold in Nevada and Oregon for early November (-1F at Elko Nevada).
4th: Floods in western Turkey killed at least 62 people, mostly children in shanty towns, and many others were reported missing in the worst rainstorm to hit the area in more than 50 years.
4th: Violent storms swept Germany's Baltic coast overnight and the worst floods in the region for 40 years uprooted trees and cut off power lines. The northern cities of Rostock, Wismar, Stralsund, Greifswald, Kiel, Flensburg und Luebeck were worst affected by the freak storms - in some areas, water levels rose by up to 2m above normal.
5th: Super-typhoon Angela is feared to have killed more than 600 people in the Philippines. Angela's death toll has surpassed that of storm Zack, which ravaged the central Philippines last week, killing at least 165. In 1984, Typhoon Ike, with 130 mph winds, killed 4,353 people in the Philippines.
5th: An unusually early Arctic outbreak in Germany over the weekend. Frequent snow showers on Sat and Sunday have left Munich with about a 4 inch snow cover. Temperatures unusually low for early November (below freezing in Munich all weekend).
6th: French health authorities advised children and old people to stay indoors as Parisians en masse turned on home heaters for the season's first cold spell and triggered an air pollution alert. The air pollution reached Level Two, at which point authorities must inform the public. At Level Three, they are authorised to order cuts in road traffic or heating levels.
6th: Blizzards paralyzed much of former Yugoslavia in the first heavy snowfall of the winter. In Serbia road, air and rail traffic was severely disrupted and Yugoslav airline flights were running up to two hours late because of snow and fog.
6th: Thousands of Romanian towns and villages were plunged into darkness and road, rail and air transport were disrupted after blizzards swept the country at the weekend. Almost 2,300 towns and villages in eastern and central Romania were blacked out after blizzards damaged hundreds of electric pylons and over 8,000 transformers.
7th: At least 37 people were injured, including two seriously, when a tornado shattered windows and blew the roof off a supermarket as it cut a path through the centre of Albany (Georgia, USA). One house was leveled and others sustained damage.
7th: A 'spectacular' duck migration through Washington DC appears to be winding down after forcing three major airports to close temporarily. Gigantic flocks of migrating birds overwhelmed radars last Thursday, causing airports in Kansas City, Mo., Des Moines, Iowa, and Omaha, Neb., to suspend operations. A combination of weather and a good breeding year sent millions of ducks and geese flocking south through the middle of the country. 'What really made it spectacular was how compressed it was,' because a sudden onset of cold, snowy weather and north winds pushed the birds south all at once.
8th: At least five people have died in two days of snowstorms that caught Hungary unprepared. The victims, mostly elderly, died outdoors in the eastern county of Hadju-Bihar near the Romanian border.
9th: A 'typhoon' has hit Russia's far east, killing at least two people, damaging hundreds of houses and disrupting heat and power supplies in towns. Interfax news agency said the wind speed on Sakhalin island was well over 30 metres per second. A controller at the Sakhalin's port of Korsakov said he had not seen such devastation in 40 years.
10th: Nearly 200 Bangladeshi fishermen were missing in the Bay of Bengal after a storm lashed the coast and offshore islands. The storm, generating winds of up to 80 kph, flattened hundreds of thatched homes and triggered a five-feet high tidal surge that inundated low areas.
11th-12th: Thousands of customers were without electricity on Sunday from North Carolina to Maine after a night of violent weather that killed one person and brought wind gusting to 81 mph and thunderstorms with snow.
12th: Building collapses caused by heavy rains in Nepal claimed 17 lives, raising to 49 the number of avalanche-related deaths in the Himalayan region in two days. On Saturday, after a 2metre fall of heavy snow, an avalanche killed 32 people. The avalanche was the worst disaster to strike a trekking or mountaineering expedition in Nepal. The unexpected rains on Friday and Saturday, believed to be linked to cyclonic weather in the Bay of Bengal, caused temperatures to plummet.
12th: A landslide triggered by heavy rains plowed into nine homes, a gas station and a telephone office, killing at least two people, 130 miles northeast of Bogota.
12th: Foehn conditions to the north of the Alps. In Munich the max. temp. was only 2.8C, however, only 80 km to the south, Garmisch-Partenkirchen had 16.7C, and Vaduz (Liechtenstein) had 21.9C. Barely a week before Garmisch-Partenkirchen was reporting over 35cm of snow and a min. temp. of -13.8C.
13th: At least 25 people froze to death and over 100 have been taken to hospitals with frostbite in the Russian capital since the start of November; the victims, who keeled over in night time temperatures around -5F, were all drunk. Temperatures below freezing are not unusual for Moscow in November. But this year's frosts have been accompanied by heavy snowfalls which have seriously hampered ambulance services.
14th: Schools were closed in parts of North Carolina and Virginia because of slippery roads, after some schools in Virginia had closed early on Monday because of early snowfall. Temperatures already have been low enough this season for artificial snow in parts of North Carolina. Sugar Mountain opened last week. West Virginia's Snowshoe resort has already been open a week. This is just the 2nd time in 34yrs that skiing has started so early in the area.
14th: The worst typhoons to ravage central Vietnam in decades have killed at least 137 people, destroyed more than 8,000 homes and caused more than $57 million in damages. Another 46 people were missing in the region, after three typhoons and tropical storms hit the coast this month and in October. Heavy seasonal floods which began in August,in the southern Mekong River delta had killed 142 people as of late October, according to official news reports.
17th: The worst November blizzard in memory hit Scandinavia, shutting factories, grounding airplanes. At least one person was found dead under a snowdrift and 3 died in a car accident in southern Sweden. Mountainous waves halted passenger ship traffic in the Baltic Sea. Scandinavian Airlines said it cancelled two-thirds of its European flights and more than half its Scandinavian routes. Up to 15 inches of snow was reported in southern Sweden. An unknown number of people reportedly spent the night stuck in cars in western Sweden after being forced off the highway by blinding snow.
17th-18th: Two American skiers died of exposure after losing their way in a snowstorm on a French Alps glacier. Four other members of the seven-strong group of unnamed students from Ohio, all in their 20s, were rescued suffering from severe hypothermia. Two of them also suffered frostbite. They lost their way while skiing on the Grande Motte glacier, above the resort of Tignes, and had to spend the night in the open.
18th: Low temperatures have killed 8 people in Chicago. Last winter's death toll there was 28.
22nd: Temperatures dropped below 0F in some places near Lake Superior as cold air spread throughout much of the eastern USA. With the cold air moving east, freeze warnings were posted for the South Carolina coastal region. The temperature in Tallahassee, Florida, dipped to 27F, tying the 1987 record for the date.
24th: The long-suffering farming community in eastern Australia was facing flooded crops and paddocks following soaking rain during the past week which looks like breaking five years of crippling drought. Farmers in the eastern states of New South Wales and Queensland, who have been battling to survive the worst drought in living memory, have received falls of 50 to 250 mm in 7 days.
25th: A cyclone packing 70 mph winds lashed Bangladesh's coast for three hours. At least five people were killed and 200 were missing. Authorities began evacuating 300,000 residents on Friday.
25th: At least 100 cars piled up in the fog in a series of chain-reaction crashes on two freeways in California, leaving one person dead and 30 people injured. Visibility was so bad that police 'could hear accidents all around them, but they couldn't see them'.
26th: The view of hundreds of scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is that recent temperature rises cannot be explained away by natural climatic variations and there is a 'detectable' human influence on the world's weather. But officials fear that the IPCC's 'scientific working group,' which meets in Madrid on Monday to finalise its report to governments, will still come under pressure from energy interest groups to back away from that conclusion.
26th: Reno's (Nevada) longest dry spell in at least 107 years ended when a storm dropped 0.19 inches of rain. The 129-day dry spell before Saturday's storm was the longest since record-keeping began in 1888.
27th: Almost 140 people have frozen to death in Moscow since the weather turned cold early in November, the city health department said.
28th: Barely 48hrs after temperatures of 79F, snow flurries in the Dallas-Fort Worth (USA) area gave accumulations to 3 ins deep in places. The area's last significant accumulation was on Thanksgiving Eve 1993, when 1 to 2 inches lasted overnight before melting.
29th: More heavy rain fell in the (USA) Pacific Northwest, where rivers already were over their banks. Every major river in western Washington state was over flood stage, forcing evacuation of residents from several rural areas and small towns.
30th: Rainfall eased after three days of heavy downpours that triggered floods along every major river in western Washington State (USA) and forced hundreds to evacuate. Some rivers began receding in the southwestern part of the state, but they continued to rise in the northwest. The heavy rain came in on a 'Pineapple Express,' a warm, wet weather system that swept into the region from the South Pacific. Melting snow added to the volume of water in the rivers.

World weather news, December 1995

1st: Mexico City ordered polluting factories to cut back production and children to stay inside schools after the ever-present smog reached critical levels. Air pollution was bad enough to cause breathing problems in an estimated 400,000 of Mexico City's 20 million people. Winter's cold air pushes down the brown layer of pollution that hangs over the valley. By Friday afternoon, monitors recorded more than twice the acceptable level of ozone, the major component of smog.
2nd: Buffeted by gale-force winds and a raging sea, a Canadian navy helicopter swooped down into the North Atlantic and plucked 30 people from the pitching deck of a sinking cargo ship, during a storm in the Atlantic about 700 miles northeast of Bermuda.
3rd: Except for people who'd rather not have to shovel a few feet of white stuff to get to the mailbox, this season's been a dud in Alaska. A dry trend started in October because a high pressure area has been stalled over Nunivak Island in the Bering Sea, diverting moist air from the Anchorage area. It was the city's driest November since 1985 and among the brownest since 1921. Anchorage had a scant nine-one-hundredths of an inch of new snow during the entire 30-day stretch; 39ins fell last year. Valdez, the oil port that got a record nine feet of snow last November, has only about an inch on the ground.
4th: A schoolteacher and 6 children died after a river suddenly flooded in the French Alps; the river near Grenoble, apparently due to release of water from a hydroelectric dam.
5th: Brutal winter weather forced Bucharest to close its international airport, while Bulgaria shut it two largest seaports. Flights to Bucharest's Otopeni airport were diverted to other cities in the region after snow and gusting winds reduced visibility to 300 feet. Winds gusted up to 49 mph in Bucharest, while snow drifts reached depths of 2metres in the south of Romania.
6th: A foot (30 cm) of snow snarled NATO's flight plans into Sarajevo, slowing the arrival of advance parties headed for Bosnia's capital to establish bases for a 60,000-strong peace force. (6th) A landslide, caused by heavy rains, killed five people in one family in a suburb of the Algerian capital. The slip was caused by heavy rains which started Tuesday and continued into Wednesday.
8th: Wintry weather howled through the USA's midsection, plunging temperatures below 0F and wind chills to as far as -71F. Heavy snow fell amid blizzard-like conditions from North Dakota to Iowa. Icy roads were blamed for two traffic deaths in Kentucky.
9th: The first wintry blast of the season, dumped as much as 36ins of snow in Michigan's Upper Peninsula overnight.
9th: The West African state of Burkina Faso has asked its development partners for food aid for 1996 to fill a cereal deficit, following unexpectedly poor rainfall in certain areas during this year's growing season. The worst-hit areas were in the dry north. The south and the west had good harvests and were in surplus but this was not enough to fill the deficit.
9th: Wind chills of -35F to -65F in Wisconsin forced cancellation of a 'polar bear plunge' for hardy swimmers at a lake in Madison.
10th: A small, stubborn storm piled 37.9ins of snow on Buffalo, N.Y., virtually shutting it down. The snow was produced by a so-called lake-effect storm - cold wind picking up moisture from Lake Erie and dropping it on land. The fall shattered the previous record 24-hour snowfall record there of 25 inches set in January 1982.
11th: Nearly 1.25 inches of rain fell in a three-hour period in the San Francisco area (USA). The deluge opened a 100-foot-deep sinkhole in one of city's more expensive suburbs. The hole, caused in part by a break in a storm sewer pipe, gobbled up a three-story Tudor-style house, a garage, a power pole and trees and forced the evacuation of several other houses.
12th: In coastal Northern California, Oregon and Washington, winds gusting over 100 mph made skyscrapers creak and groan, and knocked out power to more than 1.5 million people. At least 6 people died.
11th-13th: The cyclone off NW Australia this week was connected by frontal cloud right across Australia and into New Zealand. The result has been a persistent deluge on the West Coast of the South Island linking back across Otago to give heavy rains on the normal dry rainshadow area. Rainfall values for the period 11--13th reached up to 660mm in the Franz Joseph Glacier area on the West Coast. At Alexandra in the normal dry rainshadow area of Central Otago over 100mm appears to have fallen in 36 hrs to 11pm on the 13th (annual average is 400mm). The rain gave the highest flood on Clutha River at Alexandra on record, and major flooding and disruption on West Coast and on Canterbury rivers.
13th: Sarajevo declared a state of emergency as two feet of snow buried the city, closing the airport temporarily and delaying flights of NATO troops and equipment on a Bosnia peace mission. It was the heaviest fall for over 10 years.
12th-13th: Torrential rain and hail overnight caused heavy flooding in the southern Algarve region of Portugal reaching up to three feet in depth in the town of Armacao de Pera.
13th: Scientists have discovered an atmospheric phenomenon they call 'elves' - flashes of light that occur at far higher altitudes than ordinary lightning and are too fast to see with the naked eye. Elves - short for Emissions of Light and Very Low Frequency Perturbations From Electromagnetic Pulse Sources -- join a small collection of luminous electrical phenomena that appear briefly after lightning strikes. Others are 'red sprites' high in the atmosphere and 'blue jets' at cloud tops. Walter A. Lyons, a scientist and president of ASTeR Inc. said 'Basically, when a lightning bolt hits the ground, it gives off essentially a blast of electromagnetic radiation. As the wave goes passing through the upper atmosphere, it causes molecules to become excited and emit light. That's when we get this very brief, rather bright flash of light.'
13th: Floods and heavy snow in central and southern Iran have cut off hundreds of villages. One person is known to have died in the floods in Bushehr province on the Gulf coast which caused damage estimated at approximately $1.7 million.
14th: Record rainfall in Brazil's central state of Minas Gerais has left 16 people dead and 300 homeless. Flooding was caused by the heaviest rainfall recorded in December in the last 34 years.
: Nearly 9 inches of rain fell from Sunday night to Monday afternoon in Nederland, Texas, flooding 30 homes. (17-18th)
19th: A snowstorm moved through the Mississippi and Tennessee valleys (USA) as it spread up to 10 inches of snow from Oklahoma and Kansas through the Ohio Valley and into the Northeast. Moist air flowing atop arctic air hugging the ground also produced areas of freezing rain, glazing highways and pulling down power lines with ice up to 2 inches thick in places.
23rd: Three newborn babies froze to death in northern Bangladesh, pushing the toll in the cold wave sweeping the region for two weeks to 39. The infants died minutes after a midwife delivered them inside huts made of clay walls and straw roofs in Rangpur district. Temperatures have dropped to 39F with icy winds and thick fog compounding the sufferings of people who are ill-equipped to handle the cold.
25th: At least 130 people died in flooded communities around Pietermaritzburg, about 240 miles southeast of Johannesburg (South Africa). Weeks of heavy rains have caused mountain streams, including the Duzi River, to overflow their banks.
26th: Some of the worst snowstorms on record left thousands of families in Scotland without power, many for a second day. Hundreds of engineers battled drifts as high as 30 feet to restore power to about 5,000 families. Snow also blanketed England's northeast coast and much of Wales. Northern Ireland had its first white Christmas in years. But more than 500 people braved snow and below freezing temperatures to plunge into the icy North Sea at Sunderland in northeast England - and raised 17,000 pounds for 45 local charities.
27th: Blizzards have killed 80 people and sent dozens more to hospital with frostbite in northern Kazakhstan. Last weekend, Siberian snow storms in neighboring Russia killed four people and more than 100 cattle and left tens of thousands of people without electricity.
27th: Soldiers in heavy vehicles and helicopters evacuated 2,000 people from their homes in northern Albania after heavy rains cut off villages and flooded the region. Three hundred houses and more than 2,000 acres of land were under water in the village of Kuc.
27th: More than 4,000 pigs, worth around 75 million pesetas, drowned in Bascones del Agua in northern Spain when a river burst its banks after torrential rain and flooded the farm where they lived.
27th: Heavy rains, wind and snow have killed at least five people as burst riverbanks, uprooted trees and landslides caused chaos throughout Spain. The worst floods were recorded near Caceres in the southwest where many rivers burst their banks.
27th: Temperatures fell below freezing again early Wednesday throughout much of Florida but the state's citrus and vegetable crops suffered little damage. The cold wave began last weekend in Florida and gave residents the chilliest Christmas in six years.
27th: Torrential rains pounded southern Brazil for the third consecutive day, killing at least 28 people and leaving more than 3,000 homeless. Flooding and mudslides in the state of Santa Catarina have left at least 25 people dead since Monday.
27th: Snow has been cleared from some roads, but hundreds of people were still without power as northern Scotland tried to dig out from a huge holiday snow storm before the next round of bad weather. Temperatures dropped to -20C overnight.
27th: Civil defence authorities issued a new flood warning as weary police and rescuers warned the death toll could top 300 in the South African Zulu homeland's double Christmas tragedy of flooding and violence.
28th: More than 600 people have been evacuated from their homes in the southern Bosnian city of Mostar because of fears that floods might burst a war-damaged dam.
28th: The death toll from brutal blizzards raging across northern Kazakhstan rose to 99, and rescuers were searching for at least five missing people as a new storm hit the former Soviet republic in Central Asia.
28th: A week of heavy rain has caused severe flooding and landslides, killing more than 45 people and forcing 28,000 to flee their homes in southern and southeastern Brazil. In the states of Santa Catarina, Rio Grande do Sul and Minas Gerais, rivers overflowed their banks, landslides destroyed hillside homes and entire communities were left isolated after the floods destroyed highways and washed away bridges.
<29thdd>More than 50,000 people fled for their lives after tropical storm Dan smashed their homes in the southern Philippines. Dan lashed southern Mindanao island with peak winds of up to 85 mph. Rivers burst their banks, forcing 40,000 people in Agusan and Surigao provinces in Mindanao to flee.
29th: More than 50 people, many of them children, have now died in a severe cold snap sweeping northern Bangladesh.
29th: Flash floods caused by a thaw and heavy rains killed six people and damaged crops in Romania this week. The floods affected crops in the central Transylvania region where people were evacuated from several villages. Flood waters affected more than 2,400 households, cut road and rail links, telephone lines and power supplies.
29th: Temperatures in parts of northern Britain fell to record lows and meteorologists predicted that an unprecedented cold snap which has killed at least 12 people over the last week could worsen. Glasgow had an all-time low of -20C while Aberdeen set a December record of -15C.
30th: A week-long cold snap has damaged Florida's tropical fish industry, killing large numbers of fish.
30th: Heavy downpours, strong winds and snow have inundated Spain, killng least eight people during the past week and forcing hundreds from their homes. Nearly continuous rainfall since Christmas has overflowed rivers, flooded city streets and farms and caused numerous detours on main highways. People have been advised to drive only in emergencies. The southern coastal region of Andalusia and the northern and western plains around the cities of Caceres, Leon and Valladolid were hardest hit.
31st: More than 1,300 passengers were stranded on two ferries in the Irish Sea Sunday after rough weather prevented docking at the Welsh port of Holyhead for nearly 24 hours, coastguards said.
31st: Drought in eastern Ethiopia is affecting 400,000 people, officials said in an appeal for international aid. About 20 people had died of hunger since November.
31st: Snow shut down Milan's Linate airport, and storms convinced many travellers to take trains instead of cars to Italian holiday destinations. Ski resorts delighted in fresh snow. Heavy rain battered much of central and southern Italy, as well as some coastal areas, including Venice, where water in the canals lapped at the edges of pavements.
31st: More than 106 people have died in a cold wave in Mexico, which surrounded the capital with a rare blanket of snow. Snow is rare in tropical Mexico City. In December, the temperature usually hits the low 70s at midday.

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Last updated 28 September 2015.