Flash floods have swept through Nepal's central Gorkha district after a pre-dawn landslide on 11 October blocked the Budhi Gandaki River, triggering severe downstream flooding. Two villages in the worst-affected Chumanubri rural municipality were reportedly destroyed, with homes, roads and bridges washed away. Part of a hydropower station was also damaged.
The national disaster risk reduction and management authority reported that 204 homes were damaged and more than 650 people had been affected. River levels surged from 2 metres to nearly 8.5 metres within hours, and more than 100 foreign trekkers were left stranded in the popular hiking region. The floods come just two months after catastrophic flooding and landslides devastated parts of the country on the border with Tibet, leaving thousands dead or missing.
Separately, an exceptionally deep area of low pressure barrelled towards Iceland this week. Its central pressure was measured at 931mb on 14 October, having plummeted by 49mb in 24 hours, a drop that meets the threshold for explosive cyclogenesis, known as a weather bomb. The system brought sustained winds of 55 to 60mph to the southern shores of the island before moving north-east through the North Atlantic towards Norway, though Iceland was spared the strongest winds.
A trailing 1,000-mile cold front stretching from Norway to the mid-Atlantic produced a 108mph gust at Bealach Na Bà in the Scottish Highlands. Meanwhile, summer-like conditions have extended further into meteorological autumn in Portugal. After temperatures of 40C at the end of September, a maximum of 35.6C was recorded on 14 October in the southern town of Mora, a climatological anomaly of more than 10C. High pressure and unseasonably warm air are expected to remain in place for several days, with temperatures slowly returning towards average around the middle of next week.