In this issue of Weather

Some weather‐related events receive a good deal of attention – perhaps especially those of recent years. Others, though, have received little attention. In this month's first paper, on p. 139, Colin Clark brings a serious damaging flooding event in Scarborough in June 1857 to our attention. Clearly, if such events have occurred in the past, they may happen again, if not in the same place, perhaps in similar locations elsewhere, so this historical account is of great value to the flood‐forecasting community. Increasingly, we have seen that desert dust may not only bring the hazard of poor visibility and discomfort, but has significant health effects, especially in areas close to the deserts. Şeyda Tilev‐Tanriover and Abdullah Kahraman document two falls of mud rain in Istanbul, Turkey in the relatively dusty eastern Mediterranean winter of 2010. Over the past few years, the South East local centre of the RMetS has been running an increasingly successful photographic competition and some of the best pictures from it are published on both p. 152 and inside the front cover of this issue. As always with the pictures published in Weather , these are well worth a look and I hope they may encourage you, the reader, to send in your notable pictures to the RMetS competitions, for the calendar, or for publication. On p. 153, Jonathan Fairman and his co‐authors examine radar data as a precipitation climatology tool for Britain and Ireland, assessing the quality of rainfall imagery by comparison with raingauge data. A clear conclusion states the difficulties associated with the use of radar data alone, as well as the errors of raingauges. In addition, it looks at some of the issues that may occur once the radar network for Ireland and Britain is converted to dual‐polarisation Doppler scanning over the next few years. We return to our occasional look at the weather of the tropics on p. 158. Kiprop Vincent Koech looks at divergence in the upper troposphere and convergence at low levels as a guide to rainfall development over equatorial East Africa. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the areas conducive to cumulonimbus cloud formation and convective rainfall are the East African Highlands, but the clear consistent results from atmospheric model products is an encouraging sign, reminding us that dynamics are a key element in convection, as well as moist stratified atmospheric developments.