Vesuvius (August or October / November)?

[Kitsune]

I was reading this on Wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eruption_o ... e_eruption
The year of the eruption is pinned to 79 AD (that is, the corresponding year of the Roman ab urbe condita calendar era) by references in contemporary Roman writers, a number of them apart from Pliny the Younger, and has never been seriously questioned. It is determined by the well-known events of the reign of Titus. Vespasian died that year. When Titus visited Pompeii to give orders for the relief of the displaced population, he was the sole ruler. In the year after the eruption, 80 AD, he faced another disaster, a great fire at Rome.

The time of year is stated once in one historical document, the first letter of Pliny the Younger to Tacitus,[25] as "nonum kal. Septembres", which is not a regular syntactic unit and has no syntax (the grammarians say, indeclinable), but would seem to be an abbreviation of a standard date. By 79 the Julian Calendar was in use. The inscribing of dates was abbreviational and formulaic. Whether anyone knew exactly what the abbreviation stood for is questionable (compare English Mr. and Mrs.); certainly, literary representations such as Pliny's left out or misinterpreted key elements that would be required for the understanding of a produced meaning. Pliny's date (supposing that the date we now find in the text is the same one given by Pliny) would have been a.d. IX kal. sept., to be interpreted as "the ninth day before the Kalends of September", which would have been 8 days before 1 September, or 24 August (the Romans counted 1 September as one of the nine).

24 August is not necessarily the date given by Pliny. It represents an editorial collusion to use the text of Codex Laurentianus Mediceus (a manuscript), which also appears in the 1508 printed edition of Aldus Manutius, in all recensions since then, even though the numerous Pliny manuscripts as well as the works of other authors offer many alternatives.[35] Unfortunately, the portion of Tacitus Histories in which he most likely made specific use of the letter - requested for that purpose from his friend Pliny - and where he would have mentioned the date, does not survive; although Tacitus would have made use of Pliny's letter, the textual traditions of the two works, with their likely references to the date, would have been completely separate and not contaminated by each other. Since the textual tradition of any of Tacitus works through the middle ages, up to the first printed editions, is much slimmer than that of Pliny's letters,[36] and rests directly on relatively early textual witnesses (although the direct parent codices of these have been lost) the risk of multiple scribal errors and variants of the date creeping in would have been much smaller for this lost Tacitus text.

Archaeological dissent from this view began with the work of Carlo Maria Rosini in 1797, to be followed by a succession of archaeologists putting forward evidence to the contrary, though mainstream scholarly opinion has long been in favour of August 24. Discussion on the subject has increased somewhat in recent years. Some of the archaeological evidence from Pompeii does suggest that the town may likely have been buried about two or three months later. For example, people interred in the ashes appear to be wearing warmer clothing than the light summer clothes that would be expected in August. The fresh fruit, olives and vegetables in the shops are typical of October, and conversely the summer fruit that would have been typical of August was already being sold in dried, or conserved form. Wine fermenting jars had been sealed over, and this would have happened around the end of October. The coins found in the purse of a woman buried in the ash include a commemorative coin that should have been minted at the end of September.[37]

A 2007 study by Rolandi, De Lascio and Stefani of 20 years of data concerning wind direction at meteorological stations in Rome and Brindisi established wind patterns in the Vesuvius area above 14 kilometres (46,000 ft) with more precision than was previously known.[38] From June through August the winds blow strongly from the west, for the rest of the time, from the east. This fact was known, but the easterly winds of the eruption were considered anomalous in August, caused (conjecturally) by the weak and shifting winds of the transition. The authors argued that the winds of 79 produced long depositional patterns and therefore would not have been this weak, and that the transition occurs in September, not August (their reference data, though, are from modern weather observations and might not match the patterns of those same months in antiquity with precision) . The authors therefore reject the August date as being inconsistent with the patterns of nature.

The rejection is not of Pliny's eyewitness account or of Pliny's date, as transmitted in the text read in modern times. The rejection focuses on manuscript variants looking for possible sources of copyist alteration of Pliny's date. In some ancient and medieval manuscripts of other authors, the month has been omitted. If some original had no month, then the copyists may have felt obliged to provide one, but chose wrongly. Rolandi et al. suggest an original date of a.d. IX kal dec (23 November) or a.d. ix kal nov (24 October) more in line with the evidence of weather observations and wind patterns. The question remains an open one, and different reliable scholarly sources (modern secondary sources and discussions) continue to propose different dates.

Assuming that the arguments are valid, I would think that it is much more likely to have occurred in October / November than in August.
Thoughts?