**4. Date of the AD 79 eruption**

The south-easterly trend of the AD 79 products appears to be anomalous, because the eruption is conventionally believed to have occurred on August 24, when its southeast dispersive trend falls in a transitional period from the summer to autumnal wind regimes [11]. In fact, the AD 79 tephra dispersive direction toward the southeast is not in agreement with the June–August high-altitude wind directions in the region that are rather toward the west. This poses serious doubt about the date of the eruption and the mismatch raises the hypothesis that the eruption occurred in the Autumnal climatic period (October), when high-altitude winds were also blowing toward the southeast. New archaeological findings presented in the [11] study definitively place the date of eruption in the Autumn (October), in good agreement with the prevailing high-altitude wind directions above Somma-Vesuvius ([11]; references therein).
