Lashing rain may bring misery in some parts of the world, but it has produced smiles of joy in south-east Asia. For the first time in four months the grey, dismal and sometimes choking haze caused by forest and peat fires in Indonesia has cleared away, and monsoon rains have arrived to dampen the flames.
Mass prayer meetings welcomed the first flights this week into smog-bound airports across Sumatra, one of the worst-affected regions. The first plane in 75 days landed in Jambi, where visibility was frequently down to 10 metres. People gathered at the airport to offer thanks. Of the 15 airports in Sumatra and Kalimantan, only one remains closed.
With El Nino producing an unusually dry airstream over the region this year, nature has had to be given a helping hand in the form of cloud-seeding operations over Indonesia. These will continue, officials said. Meteorologists have warned that normal monsoon cloud patterns have not yet formed.
In Singapore the meteorological department has officially declared the smog to be over. "The arrival of the north-east monsoon and change in wind direction have cleared the haze," said the deputy director, Mr Wong Teo Suan. There are still patches of light haze over Kalimantan and Sumatra, but this is normal, he said. Regular blue skies have returned to the city-state just north of the Equator for the first time since the smog arrived in mid-August.
The Pollutant Standards Index (PSI) now registers levels in the healthy and moderate range. Throughout September the 24hourly air pollution readings had hovered mainly in the unhealthy range above 100. The seasonal mix of sunshine and heavy rain has also returned to neighbouring Malaysia, where the haze was much worse and seriously affected the tourist trade.
The last officially unhealthy day in the capital, Kuala Lumpur, was November 9th, and newspapers have now stopped publishing a daily pollution index, said the Irish Ambassador, Mr Brendan Lyons. "The cabinet today agreed that the haze is over," the Science, Technology and Environment Minister, Mr Datuk Law Hieng Ding, confirmed. A controversy over Cable News Network's coverage of the haze crisis in Malaysia provoked an undiplomatic exchange between the United States ambassador, Mr John Malott, and the Malaysian Prime Minister, Dr Mahathir Mohamad. Mr Malott said he had been surprised at CNN being blamed for the decline in foreign tourists, when everyone knew the reason was the haze from Indonesian forest fires.
Dr Mahathir retorted that CNN had reported 15 times in one day that haze was covering Malaysia, but when the sky was clear they "did not report anything". A government minister warned that the American network might lose business in the country if it continued to project a "bad image".
Officials in Indonesia said the rain may have been heavy enough to quench almost all fires in the worst-hit areas of south Sumatra and central Kalimantan, but heavy and prolonged rain would be needed to put out peat fires, which could continue to burn underground for months.
In July more than 300 forest fires blazed in Kalimantan and Sumatra, many set by logging companies to clear undergrowth. While the El Nino drought exacerbated the spread of smoke clouds across the region, hazes have become an annual problem, and the primary cause, the clearing of land by burning, has yet to be tackled.