"Part of the city is without electricity, sidewalks were ruined, basements flooded and supermarkets damaged," Pombal mayor Narciso Mota told private television SIC.

A woman in her 80s, who suffered from heart trouble, was found dead in her flooded house in Pombal where she lived alone, he said.

In the nearby farming town of Soure a river burst its banks and swept a school bus carrying around 50 children into a ditch, emergency services workers said. No one was injured but the driver received counseling.

The national civil protection service said it responded to nearly 700 incidents of flooding, 335 fallen trees and 19 landslides across the country since late Tuesday when the storm hit.

Dozens of roads were reported closed, mostly in central and northern areas, due to flooding and debris.

Rail service was suspended in the southernmost province of Algarve, as well as between Lisbon and second-city Oporto in the north, for several hours because of fallen trees or flooding on the track, railway officials said.

Muscovite Marina Dudko, 50, a science academy graduate, said there was no question that magnetic storms directly affect people.

"Some people react differently, but the main changes are mood swings, headaches and insomnia," she said. "They affect some people in the morning, and some people at night."

Most large celestial bodies, including Earth, are surrounded by magnetic fields known as the magnetosphere. Magnetic storms occur when the magnetosphere is struck by shock waves from the sun, such as solar flares. They usually last for a day, though some magnetic storms have been known to go on for a week.

In the West, magnetic storms' ability to interfere with animals and knock out radio communications has been documented.

It has already been proved that magnetic storms cause migratory animals such as pibecause they have internal "compasses" made of the mineral magnetite that is sensitive to magnetic fluctuations.

Races involving homing pigeons have been ruined by the disappearance of the birds during magnetic storms, leading handlers to request advanced forecasts so they can schedule races around the storms.

Radar systems, satellites and radio stations are among human communications that are frequently disrupted by the storms. Military radar that bounces signals off the ionosphere, which is affected by magnetic storms, is unreliable at that time.

Igor Klanishen, general director of the FOBOS center, a company that supplies weather information to news agencies and web sites, said forecasting magnetic storms was important because Russians believe they can be affected by them.

"I don't know what effects the storms have," Klanishen said, "but people really need this information, so we give it to them."

Repeated calls to the space research center at the Russian Academy of Sciences for an explanation of how the storms can affect the health of an individual went unanswered.

But Russians who traditionally tune in to the magnetic storms forecasts are the elderly and those with heart or circulatory problems. Those affected can take special medicine to help them cope during magnetic storms. And this is why.

"The main danger of the magnetic storms is that rhythmical changes of the geomagnetic field [magnetosphere] occur in the range of 0.5 to 2 hertz," said Elena Baud, a therapist at the Swiss Medical Association in Zurich.

"This is also the frequency at which our heart works. When the rhythm of the sun coincides with the rhythm of a human being it can bring some sad results, especially for people with heart problems."

Dr. Frank Prato, a medical biophysicist and program leader at the Lawson Health Research Institute in London, Ontario, who is at the forefront of research into the effects magnetic fields have on biological systems, agreed. "Frequencies associated with the magnetic field are in the same frequency range as human biological systems," he said by telephone from his clinic. "That interference can reduce heart rate variability."

Heart rate variability refers to the beat-to-beat alterations in the heart rate. Reductions in heart rate variability have been linked with hypertension, or high blood pressure, among other problems.

"There is good scientific literature to back up the theory that periods of changing magnetic activity can have a direct effect on biological systems," other than those of migratory animals, Prato said.

Prato's team conducted tests on mice that displayed different behavior when shielded from and then reintroduced to magnetic fields.

He said research on humans was in its infancy, and that deeper investigations were needed to back up claims by people like Maria.

But worrying about the effects of a magnetic storm may cause more problems than the storm itself.

According to a local news agency, doctors in Perm said more people reported health problems during magnetic storms, but that was because they had been warned about the storms and as a result were worrying too much about their health.

Doctors there also said that now magnetic storm forecasts are published in newspapers less frequently, the storm periods pass practically unnoticed, and the fluctuations in patient numbers are not linked to magnetic activity anymore.

This is complicated by the fact that patients with high blood pressure could be adversely affected by extra concerns over their health that the magnetic storms could in theory cause.

Baud, of the Swiss Medical Association, agreed that the storms could trigger psychosomatic problems.

Years of scientific research may yet uncover the exact manner in which magnetic storms, which cause the dazzling aurora light displays over the poles of the Earth, affect the health and behavior of humans.

Until then and probably beyond, Russians will keep on tuning into the space forecast... which, according to Gismeteo.ru, is all clear for the next two days except for a "slight geomagnetic disturbance" between 3 a.m. and 9 a.m. on Friday.

Speaking at the Tenant Farmers Association's 25th anniversary conference this week, the University of London's Emeritus Philip Stott said media-hype and the lack of a robust energy policy over the past 30 years had been major problems.

"We are walking into danger if we think we can stop climate change - we can't, but we can mess up the British economy. Energy security for Britain is a very serious issue and we need a realistic policy that will slow down climate change. But let's not be conned that we can stop it."

In terms of the effect on the climate, emitting gases and not emitting gases were equally unpredictable, but politically it is not something that is talked about, Professor Stott said.

"Don't be taken in by the current politics around climate change - be very cautious as there are agendas attached. As farmers, the only thing you have to worry about is to adapt. What we want from government policy is flexibility. We don't want to place farming in a straight jacket."

Flexibility is particularly important for tenant farmers considering growing energy crops, or going into other long-term energy projects, he noted.

More important than climate change, water management will be the number one issue in the future, Professor Stott said, suggesting that some form of pricing mechanism will be needed.

"We still treat water as a free good in Britain, and for the past 30 years, we have put-off measures that will help manage water use. We will have to value it for any pricing mechanism to work."

Experts said a total of 450 minor quakes have been registered over the past 24 hours near Karymsky, Kamchatka's most active volcano, in the southeast of the peninsular, which rises to 1,536 metres (5,039 feet) above sea level.

Satellite images show an ash plume 12 kilometers long and four kilometers wide, with a 100-km ash tail stretching southeastwards at a height of 3,500 meters (11,500 feet).

The volcano erupted in February following an 11-year period of normal activity. Ash emissions and about 230 minor tremors were reported last week. Experts say the volcano's activity has been accelerating.

This year more than 1,200 people, including 542 children, were evacuated from the north of the Kamchatka peninsula after a series of earthquakes. The first 7.8-magnitude quake, the strongest in the Koryak Autonomous Area in the north of the peninsular since 1900, injured 31 people on April 21. It also damaged about 380 houses and 25 administrative facilities in four other towns.

The over 3,000-metre-high volcano started erupting on Sunday after a long period of dormancy.

There have been several lava flows, but the eruption poses no risk to people in the region, according to the authorities.

The last major eruption was in 2001.

Scientists lower monitors into Atlantic (Image: Torsten Kanzow/NOC Southampton)
The monitoring devices provide a detailed picture of ocean changes
Measurements from a network of monitors stretching across the Atlantic Ocean could offer an early warning of "sudden climate change", scientists have said.

Underwater instruments measuring the temperature and salinity of seawater will detect any change to currents that regulate Europe's climate, they said.

A UK-led team of researchers said the data offered the most detailed picture of the ocean's circulation patterns.

The first set of results were presented at a climate conference in Birmingham.

'Heat pump'

The array of 19 "moorings" is positioned at points 26.5 degrees north in the Atlantic Ocean, providing an insight to the Meridional Overturning Circulation (MOC) that acts as the Earth's "heat pump", distributing heat via the ocean from the equator to northern regions.


The north Atlantic conveyor

Enlarge Image

By the time it reaches the northern latitudes around Greenland and Iceland, the water has cooled so much that it sinks towards the ocean's floor and heads south again, a process known as "overturning".

The process is density driven, so is sensitive to changes in the temperature and salinity of the water.

Computer climate models predict that the overturning may weaken or switch off altogether as freshwater from melting ice sheets flow into the sea.

An increased flow of freshwater makes the ocean less saline and lowers the density, meaning the waters cannot sink and the overturning weakens.

"We have deployed an array to monitor and observe the Atlantic Overturning Circulation," the project's principal investigator, Harry Bryden, said.

Atlantic map. Image: BBC
The Rapid team monitored at roughly 26 degrees north
The array of moorings reaches across the ocean from Africa to the US. Each mooring consists of a wire up to 5,000m long that stretches from the sea floor to about 15m below the surface.

An assortment of instruments are attached to the wire at fixed depths, taking a reading every 15 minutes.

The data is stored until it is uploaded by researchers when the moorings are recovered after 12 months at sea.

The moorings are positioned in three locations: off the coast of west Africa, just south of the Canary Islands; the mid-Atlantic ridge; and to the east of the Bahamas.

"The first year's measurements really established the size of the short-term variability," Professor Bryden told BBC News.

"This is really important because we never knew this before."

Ship's crew prepare for a night-time deployment of equipment (Image: Nerc)
The moorings were first put into position in 2004
Professor Bryden, from the UK's National Oceanography Centre, was the lead author on a paper published in the journal Nature last year that suggested the overturning circulation had declined by 30% over the past 50 years. That was based on a snapshot of data from the array.

The findings were based on five historical "snapshot" measurements of overturning in 1957, 1981, 1992, 1998 and 2004.

"The issue was how big was the variability in the five snapshot measurements, and that was something we needed to know," he said.

Using the first year's data from the array, the researchers were able to adjust their calculations.

"We concluded that there was some evidence of a small decrease but not as big as we reported in the Nature paper last year," Professor Bryden observed.

"But we have had a decrease... in the order of 10% of the overturning circulation in the past 25 years."

Rapid climate change

He said the findings demonstrated that they were able to monitor changes, and act as an alert to any sudden shifts in the ocean circulation that could have a profound impact on the UK's and north-west Europe's climate.

"The ice core records suggest sudden warming or cooling happen on a scale of about a decade. The timescale for temperature change, which are in the order of 5-10C (9-18F), also happen in about a 10-year period," he explained.

The project forms the centrepiece of the Rapid research programme, led by the UK's Natural Environment Research Council (Nerc).

The programme has 36 research projects that will run until at least 2008, and aims to develop a better understanding of the causes of rapid climate change and what might happen in the future.

Professor Bryden presented the UK-US team's findings at a four-day conference, organised by Nerc, where scientists working on the Rapid project discussed the ongoing research.

"With sea level at these higher levels, flooding by major storms would inundate many low-lying neighborhoods and shut down the entire metropolitan transportation system with much greater frequency," said Vivien Gornitz, a climate scientist who is part of a team at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and Columbia University.

Gornitz, along with Cynthia Rosenzweig, another researcher on the team, say that higher sea levels put New York city at greater risk of hurricane storm surge. They estimate that in the case of a 1.5-foot-rise in sea level, "surge for a category 3 hurricane on a worst-case track would cause extensive flooding in many parts of the city. Areas potentially under water include the Rockaways, Coney Island, much of southern Brooklyn and Queens, portions of Long Island City, Astoria, Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Queens, lower Manhattan, and eastern Staten Island from Great Kills Harbor north to the Verrazano Bridge."

The researchers note that hurricanes have hit New York City in the past and caused extensive damage.