Monday notes

Horrendous weather through the night, winds blowing, rains lashing - only for it all to subside after daybreak. Sunrise here at around 8.15 am. Don't forget the clocks go back next weekend. It'll lengthen the morning, but will seriously curtail the afternoons to sunset before 5pm. Nice. Not.

It is currently falling quiet on the hurricane front. Tropical storm Kiko is veering out into the open Pacific, west of Baja California, where it will dissipate later this week. No other cyclones to report on, and none are in the offing. The northern hemisphere season is now winding down to its close on November 30th, whilst the southern hemisphere season will commence next week on November 1st. Anything land-threatening will continue to feature on this blog.

Although there have been some huge typhoons in the Pacific, and the Atlantic has seen fit to flex its muscles with two category 5 hurricanes (Dean and Felix), we can safely say that the hurricane season has (so far) been mercifully moderate. The forecasters at the National Hurricane Center are very jumpy with their pre-season outlook, afraid they're going to miss another "2005", which extended into January 2006 and wreaked havoc in the North Atlantic basin.

Meanwhile, the Mediterranean has been playing host to "Medicanes", depressions which look suspicious like tropical cyclones on the satellite imagery. The water temperatures in the Mediterranean (at 23C / 73F) are too low for fully blown hurricane formation, but it is suggested that with the current trend in climate change, water temperatures could rise to the threshold of 26C / 80F. Some of the medicanes seen in the Mediterranean over the years would have warranted a name, had the National Hurricane Center in Miami been in charge. Nobody is, but methinks the World Meteorological Organisation better put its thinking cap on about this issue.

Tags: hurricanes, mediterranean, wmo