Thread by @althecat

#DesertRain #ArabianStorms #Ethiopa #Sahara #Russia #Europe Special Satellite Images Report:

Here will find a series images of rain events currently underway in deserts in the East of the Western Hemisphere, as the sun goes down on #EarthDay.

Credits @zoom_earth @meteoblue

The thread begins with the mother of all deserts the astonishing Sahara. Here you see an April rain event currently underway in Algeria and Libya. #Sahara #DesertRain #EarthDay21

Here are close up images of the Libya/Algeria #DesertRain now traversing the dryest parts of the Sahara. The 1st image (zoom.earth/#view=30.2,17.…) shows rainfall signatures. The 2nd tracks the tail of this rain event back to the Atlantic coast 4500 kms to the West. #EarthDayAfrica

Meanwhile to the east yet another #SaudiArabia desert storm has sparked up in the North West. Saudi Arabia has had storms every day since the beginning of Ramadan with huge storms last Friday and Saturday. See @Arab_Storms for pics. #ArabianStorms #EarthDayKSA

Directly south of the Levant Ethiopia's little rainy season is rapidly strengthening in the build up to the full on Abbay Monsoon in July which provides 86% of northern Nile flow. The first image shows the rains getting started for the day this morning. #EarthdayEthiopia #Monsoon

This second wider image shows a wider picture of the Horn of Africa - Ethiopia in the center, Somalia (east 2nd day of intense coastal thunderstorms), South Sudan in the West and Uganda and Lake Victoria (the source of the White Nile) in the South. #EarthDay21 #HornOfAfrica

While there is no desert in Europe today there is an astonishing rain event underway, caused by a flow of Atlantic energised wet air which started last Friday. The same path is being used by the storm currently traversing the Sahara highlighted in the first part of this thread.

This huge northern storm extends into the Arctic. Its 5.2 mn sq km size puts it between India (3.3 mn) and Australia (7.7 mn) in size and it is forecast to drop lots of rain and snow over Russia, East Europe, Scandinavia & the Kazakhstan desert this week.

Here's a @zoom_earth animation of the storms in Europe. There are also big storms moving through Spain, Italy and what looks like an enormous field of thunderstorms moving in an orderly fashion across Eastern Europe. #EarthDayEU #EarthDayEurope

And the final #DesertRain animation for this #EarthDay21thread shows satellite imagery of rain falling on the 2.5 million sq km2 Centrial Asian Kazakhstan Desert [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakh_se…], the remaining large desert in the North Western hemisphere.

This image is to help orient the viewer for the animation which follows. [It looks like it may also be raining in Mongolia here, and Tibet and Xinjiang which are not included in this story.]

And the final animation. Which has a lot going on. Wet air coming in from Europe in the West (left). A complex multi layered system in the East (right) and something small shooting in very rapidly from the North. The Caspian sea can be seen in the bottom left corner.

The final image in this #Earthday21 #EarthDay #DesertRain thread shows a @NASA (Modis) Worldview image of the Eastern half of the North Western Hemisphere for today, roughly the same scene shown as that in the first tweet in this thread.

I'm grateful to this amazing living planet.

While I will only ever see parts of it in person, thanks to the wizardry of modern satellite technology and the internet I can now remotely sense it all in real time.

Hopefully this technology will help us save it. #EarthDay

Credits:

This thread was made possible by the following web services.
1. @zoom_earth zoom.earth
2. @weathermodels_ weathermodels.com
3. @Meteoblue meteoblue.com
4. @NASA WorldView worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov
5. @Wikipedia
6. @Google

#EarthDay