Alastair Thompson Profile picture
Climate, Conflict, Politics, Africa. Editor https://t.co/b6HbxvmnsV (NZ) Reporting from France. https://t.co/LNVK0y9IS7 #nzpol #DesertRain

Jun 9, 2022, 23 tweets

A satellite snapshot of planet earth over the past 24 hours. Pictorial THREAD of a day in the life of our biosphere.

Water is the source of life and this is where it comes from. It flows West near the equator and shoots out atmospheric rivers NE and SE.

Each image in this thread is fairly large [right click and select open image in a new tab to see them in greater detail.]

We begin with 24 hours over North Africa....

West Africa...

North Africa... #DesertRain

Europe...

Russia & Ukraine...

[we are now following the water back north eastwards in the Northern Hemisphere]

Central Asia the Stans and central Russia.

... over the Himalayas, Tibet and Xinjiang...

... China Japan and Korea ...

... We jump across the Pacific to the far north west of the Americas...

... then south back into the tropics, this time over central America....

... And into what is probably the greatest single area of convection, the Equatorial Pacific coast of the Americas and the Great Amazon Rain Forest....

Here we see the Northern part of the Amazon which is shooting water north East over the Sahara into Europe and Central Asia.

... here you can see water flowing in from West Africa, heading north east into the Atlantic and South east back towards Africa...

The southermost continental landmass extends down towards the Antarctic Ice Shelf.

Across the Southern Atlantic Southern Africa was possibly the least active region weather wise on the planet today.

Immediately North we find another great rainforest. Which produces the West African Monsoon. Here we see the Northern, active part of it, which is still moving northwards.

This view shows a larger view encompassing the entire equatorial African rain forest region.

Heading back eastwards again, India's Monsoon is rapidly strengthening. Fueled by a burst of convection over South East Asia and Indonesia. But also receiving atmospheric water flows from the East African Monsoon.

Here we see convection over Indonesia....

.. and the South China Sea, Philippines, Vietnam, and Thailand.

And south east of Indonesia we can see the flows heading south eastwards from Indonesia over the Great Southern Land towards New Zealand [My home]. Accompanied by a barage of Antarctic storms heading up from Antarctica.

And then to conclude we have North America which as you would expect (after watching all this closely) receives most of its weather from the South West.

The exception being hurricanes which come in from the South East with the 2022 season poised to begin.

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