Nothing out of the ordinary here, some fairly heavy rain and not as windy as yesterday afternoon, so we escaped the storm, unlike some of you.  I hope those of you in the South are recovering and your power is resumed without too much delay.

I think the Met O did well forecasting this storm and I despair of people knocking them just because they didn't get a storm in their locality.  A woman on radio 2 was giving Michael Fish a real ear bashing for encouraging people to have a day off work and she couldn't understand why her train from Northern England into London had been cancelled as the weather was OK where she was!  Doh!  You're travelling South into the storm you silly woman!!! 

Here in Norwich it's been more of a blustery autumn day than a storm.

If it was stormier last night, it wasn't loud enough to wake me!

Massive pat on the back for the Met Office, and, may I say, the models, which correctly picked this "storm" out very very early - before it had been formed.

Even GFS and NAVGEM had progged it at times, but particularly impressed with GFS, which really had the storm nailed on from way out.

OK, so the track and the strength was overplayed and underplayed at times, but there is no dobt this WAS a storm, albeit (and thankfully) not as severe as some of the models progged it to be.

However, in terms of model forecasting, this is a big winner in my view - one of the best predictions a week or more out that I have ever seen....

Met Office were not caught up in the ridiculous media hype that surrounded it, and quite frankly, as per usual, some of the media outlets should be ashamed of themselves for hyping it as something akin to 1987, which it NEVER looked likely to be.

Very tragic that there were some fatalities of course it is, but also, I must say, for once, I believe the authorities did the right thing in preparing in advance (thanks in no small part to the Met Office's performance), that doubtless prevented more casualties.

The thought of a tree falling onto a train, rather than just onto an empty track, filled me with dread.

So a big thumbs up all round from me....and though of course very tragic with the 4 deaths, it could have been a whole lot worse.....

No need to apologise.  It is just that a once in a 200yr storm, seems to me to be  trivialised, by some of the media.  Incidentally, according to IC the wind reached 135mph on the coast of N France in '87.

A similar experience here. I think the centre of the storm passed over us so we didn't get any serious gusts until the wind veered sharply W just before 08:00, and then the worst of the wind was very short lived.

I think the event was handled responsibly by the MetO, authorities, airports, train companies, etc. The only criticism I have is for some of the predictably awful advanced media coverage.

It beggars belief that people complain bitterly about others looking after their safety. No doubt the woman you quoted would also complain bitterly if her rail ticket prices were raised in order to fund the clearing of all trees that stand within 10m of a railway track.

Nothing much here in North West Hampshire.  Everyone  in to work on time and just  a few twigs and small branches reported   on the roads, although one of the guys that comes in from  the Wokingham  area had to re-route  a couple of times because of  trees down.  It sounds  like the area of stronger gusts was quite well defined.

The moment where I had to stop on the A339 this morning. I had to avoid a series of large branches and counted 9 fallen trees on the journey.....and that was in the dark

I've just looked at some impressive photos of waves crashing high over the sea walls taken this morning along the South Kent coast and yet it was a retreating neap tide at that time. Imagine if it was a high spring tide  . . . doesn't bear thinking as we would have had to contend with extensive flooding on prone low lying coastal areas (eg, the Dymchurch caravan park, Greatstone and Camber Sands).

* Shiver *.

(PS: This is NOT my photo, I was too chicken to get out there with the camera - this image belongs to this group: https://www.facebook.com/Doverseasafari )

That was my pick of the bunch Ian - hence the sharing on facebook!

There was a large limb of a tree part blocking the A327 between Eversley and the A30 when I drove to work this morning, but I was able to drive around it. There were smaller branches down all over the place as well. The areas without power were quite random, because in the office in Hook we had power all day, and yet some parts of Hook had no power all day. Parts of Hartley Wintney were also without power, the traffic lights near the Texaco garage were out this morning, and this evening when I drove home, and yet some houses clearly did have power.

Well we have power again now.

Was out from 5am until 6:30pm!

The media has been saying this is the worst storm in S England since 1987. Not sure if this is verified or not as I recall a few other similarly powerful systems since then (eg. Jan 1990, Oct 2000, Oct 2007/8 (?)).

Having said that, the storm certainly had a significant impact here in Kent. A few pics of my commute to Folkestone:

I think a lot of credit should go to the GEM model which was the first one to pick up on this storm 10+ days out.