A man is dead, a truck driver has severe injuries and two people have been struck by lightning as wild weather battered Sydney.

A month's worth of rain fell on parts of the city on Monday afternoon when an area of low pressure passed slowly over the city towards the Illawarra.

Sydney's south bore the brunt and at Lucas Heights a man died after being washed into a stormwater drain.

Paramedics were called to the Lucas Heights waste management and recycling centre on New Illawarra Road at 3.15pm, but were unable to save the man. He died at the scene and is believed to have drowned.

"Unfortunately there was nothing we could do," a NSW ambulance spokesman said.

New evidence has shown that Ireland experienced 20 years of non-stop rain in 2345BC, around the same time as Noah's great flood.

Did you know that Ireland experienced non-stop rain for 20 years?

While our less-than-brilliant weather may make this feel like a very recent event, it actually happened way back in 2345BC.

According to evidence uncovered in this Sunday's 'Secret's of the Irish Landscape' programme on RTÉ One, this period of non-stop rainfall makes it possible that the biblical story of Noah's great flood really did happen.

Professor Mike Baillie from Queen's University in Belfast has proven that the 20-year flood coincided with the traditional date for Noah's flood.

"According to the ancient Annals of the Four Masters, the whole of Ireland had to be evacuated at this time," Baillie said.

We believe this global event was caused by a big explosive volcanic eruption which loaded the atmosphere with dust to reflect the sunlight away and cause widespread cooling at the earth's surface.

Baillie has also discovered that freak weather events such as these tend to happen every thousand years or so.

With Ireland experiencing its last one in 540AD - when it rained for 10 years straight - the downpour to end all downpours is long overdue.

Lightning killed 114 sheep and 12 cows in an Aymara village in the Bolivian Andes, an official in the area said.

Dead sheep were scattered on the hill with the charred wool, said Friday by telephone to The Associated Press Panfilo Chura, secretary of the mayor of Achacachi, 80 kilometers north of La Paz where the community Yacachi Grande is located in which the phenomenon occurred on Thursday afternoon.

The lightning was so loud that it seemed that the sky was broken, a witness told the PAT television. The roar threw down the shepherd and flock Angelino Ventura, 80, who was unhurt owner. Ventura broke down in tears on Friday and said he lost all his cattle.

A great scientist named Roger Revelle had Al Gore in his class at Harvard and the Global Warming campaign was born. Revelle tried to calm things down years later, but Gore said Revelle was Senile and refused to debate.

John Coleman documents the entire story and shows how our tax dollars are perpetuating the Global Warming alarmist campaign even though temperatures have not risen in years and years.

The hailstorms and unseasonal rain have so far claimed lives of more than 2,100 cattle in the Nashik division.

Officials said compensation is likely to be given to the owners of 581 cattle only.

The heavy rain that lashed Nashik division, including Nashik, Jalgaon, Dhule, Nandurbar and Jalgaon districts, claimed the lives of 2,139 cattle that included 117 big animals - cow or buffalo and 2,022 small animals- sheep, goat, calf, donkeys. The proposal to compensate for the lost cattle is being made.

"The damage is tremendous. The reports and panchanamas so far show 2,139 cattle have died because of lighting or hailstorms. The hails were very big in size and killed the animals almost instantly. There was hardly any chance for the farmers to take care of their animals," the officer from revenue division of Nashik said.

A freak rain storm has dumped as much as 1m (3ft) of hail on Asmara, capital of Eritrea, in what appears to be the heaviest rainfall ever recorded there.

This week's storm lasted just 90 minutes, but afterwards parts of the city were completely blocked by ice, government-run newspaper Hadas Eritrea reports. Footage on local television shows streets running with water, and vehicles buried under the hail.

Spring officially starts on Thursday, but Mother Nature will bring another blast of winter weather from Missouri to Delaware before the seasons change.

A winter full of nasty snow and ice will not end quietly as a gathering storm slides east and collides with a fresh cold air mass on Sunday into Monday.

Across the South, the focus will be on severe weather. Farther north, a wintry mess will quickly unfold into Monday.

As yet another push of cold air drives southward across the Midwest and Great Lakes, moisture will surge northward. A swath of snow and sleet is expected to develop from Missouri eastward along the Ohio River on Sunday.

While the precipitation may start as a brief period of rain, the arrival of cold air should allow the majority of the precipitation to fall as snow or sleet in cities such as Springfield and St. Louis, Mo., Louisville, Ky., and Cincinnati, Ohio.
East of the Appalachians, the most treacherous conditions are expected on Sunday night through the morning commute on Monday as temperatures fall below freezing.

Snow and ice should extend along the Ohio River and then across the Mason-Dixon Line by Monday morning and even reach places as far south as the North Carolina/Virginia border.

Most places in this band can expect enough snow to shovel with some spots in the mountains of West Virginia and Virginia picking up around a half foot of fresh snow.

Since much of the snow is forecast to fall at night in locations such as Baltimore, Md., Washington, D.C., and Charleston, W.Va., roads can quickly become slick and snow covered. Conditions for Monday morning's commute will be poor.

It was late afternoon on Lake Kariba when the thunderclouds started forming like ominous grey monsters on the horizon.
We were photographing a fish eagle perched on a dead stump, the amazing colours of the bird glowing in the soft afternoon light over Matusadona National Park in Zimbabwe. Beyond the fish eagle, the storm grew darker and we could see the rain coming down over the lake in torrents.

Suddenly, what seemed like a large tornado began to form at the base of the clouds, growing bigger and bigger as it reached the water. Roger de la Harpe was lucky enough to capture this sighting with amazing skill, the regal fish eagle providing the context and foreground of this rare African phenomenon.

Lightning appears to be killing and injuring increasing numbers of people in developing countries, meteorologists and experts say.

The total casualties could even be higher than other weather-related disasters like floods, landslides and droughts.

"The frequency of lightning has somehow increased from what it used to be," says Michael Nkalubo, commissioner at Meteorological Department of Uganda, a country where lightning storms are common.

"I cannot say that a study has been carried out on this but I am saying this on the basis of my general observation.

"It is something increasing every year and we think this is a manifestation of climate change but we also need to establish whether deforestation has also contributed."

South Africa is another country in the African continent where lightning-related deaths and injuries are or the rise, officials say.

In South East Asia too experts believe lightning incidents and casualties are going up.

"It is a growing problem in the region," said Hartono Zainal Abidin, a lightning protection expert in Malaysia.

The replacement of the forest by urban areas has been causing an increase in the lightning activity in the Amazon region, Brazilian researchers suggest.

According to a study led by scientist Osmar Pinto Junior of Brazil's National Institute for Space Research, the city of Manaus, in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, has seen a 50% rise in lightning strikes in the past 30 years, reaching a current rate of 13.5 strikes per km² per year.

Looking at satellite images, Mr Pinto Junior and his team have found that, over the city, the lightning activity is larger than that in neighbour regions.

"Our results indicate that such changes have been caused by what we call Urban Heat Island (UHI)", he said.

"While in the last three decades the surface air temperature in the tropics has increased by approximately 0.4C, it has increased by 0.7C in Manaus."

Pinto Junior explains that this phenomenon occurs when green areas are replaced by buildings and other urban features, pushing the temperatures up and prompting more lightning storms.

I have already well covered the Met Office report into the recent storms, issued last month, but Dr Butina alerted me to one particular comment which I had missed. In the BBC article, Julia Slingo, introducing the report, is reported as saying:

"The UK had seen the most exceptional period of rainfall in 248 years."

Unsettled weather at this time of year was not unexpected - but the prolonged spell of rain, as well as the intensity and height of coastal waves, was "very unusual".

"We have records going back to 1766 and we have nothing like this," she said. "We have seen some exceptional weather. We can't say it is unprecedented but it is exceptional."

Dr Butina has his own full analysis here, which is worth a read. But, as soon as I read this statement again, I realised it simply was not true.

Let me explain.