The interconnections between global weather systems is becoming a trend of a fascinating voyage of metereological discovery that started in The #WestSahara in March, moved focus to #Ethiopia and #ArabianStorms in April and has now widened to include Europe and India.
The events in Europe yesterday resulted in a fairly large #ArabianStorms event in the #MiddleEast this afternoon which was not forecast.
It started midway between a line of storms across Iran and a strengthening rain laden stream crossing Yemen.
Here's a closeup of the storm's early formation. Which to me looks delightfully whimsical.
Four hours later the #ArabianStorm complex covered an area around the size of Italy. In the top left of the image you can see what most likely helped it to grow so fast. Incoming moisture coming in hot from the north.
Here is another view of this, the storm Gulf storm is bottom right. The moisture is part of the right hand plume identified in yesterday's thread - which spun north towards southern Germany whilst making a sharp turn southwards - initially making landfall in Egypt.
Here's a view of this rapidly turning easterly arm of the #WestAfricaWaterPlume from last night.
Here we see the picture from mid afternoon today. The #WestAfricanWaterPlume has become a multitude - with the strongest river in the far west. Many of the plumes are only becoming visible once they get close to the Mediterranean.
This animation shows the plumes in greater detail.
The plumes seem to operate in bursts, and the significant ones are those at the far right. This picture shows the scene as of 30 minutes ago.
The main feature is the big area of clear air in a roughly square box from the Adriatic Coast to Greece heading North East.
Compare the position of the storm in the attached tweet - the one over France [
] from 24 hours ago, with where it is now. About to be pushed across the Baltic into #Sweden.
That storm is doing a consistent 100kmph. As is the main body of the plume.
The next three animations follow the progress of the main plume bulldozer, which is proceeding almost precisely as forecast for today.
Here we see 9am to 12pm.
This animation picks up from 12pm and takes us through to 3pm.
And this one to 5.15pm.
The leading edge of what I am calling the Polish Storm is now over the Baltic. And as its development and position was well forecast we can perhaps see where it is going...
This forecast has the storm near Moscow tomorrow night & an Atlantic storm in the UK at the same time.
This images are the CMC (left) and ECMWF (right) precipitable water forecasts for 6pm tonight. They are both very good.
And here are the two forecasts for 6pm tomorrow. Unfortunately the low systems being produced by these bursts of African water are fairly consistently bringing cold Arctic air South.
We shall see what happens tomorrow I guess :)
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Ok so this is a bit weird, but in a kinda chill way so do bare with me and and I will be happy to answer questions afterwards. It’s about a castle on a virtual island in a massive online role playing game called Evony and it involves a possible but speculative discussion about @elonmusk and @X.
All will be revealed but first a picture or four actually from the game. More will come.
Ok. So here’s what I think is going on in a nutshell. I think elonmusk has invested in a MMORPG: a “Massive Multimedia Online Role Playing Game” which is a bit of a mouthful, called EVONY.
I liked its Twitter ads and finally clicked. It’s huge. Someone else can do the business story here which I am sure is interesting too.
But the this bit is weird.
The mysterious knight on the red horse arrived this morning beside my castle and he had some treasure.
I hadn’t a clue who it was so I grabbed the treasure and tried to kill the horse and rider as that’s what you do. But we got smashed badly.
This interview with working class Uk financial markets savant Gary Stevenson - who has just published an autobiography - is seriously terrifying. He now has a @YouTube channel it seems and I’ll post a link shortly.
James O'Brien meets Gary Stevenson | LBC via @YouTube
His prognosis for the collapse of social democratic nation state finances due to the very sharp rise in income distribution inequality in the UK is horrific.
The consequences of unfettered transfers of money over decades due to neoliberal economics initially and more recently quantitative easing driven transfers of wealth from the middle class to the top 5% of the population is the cause of his concern.
It’s very hard to imagine what can be done politically to rebalance this.
Thomas Piketty’s thesis which among other things warned about all of this based on long term historical analysis of wealth inequality appears to be colliding with Western Civilisation in a manner that threatens the very foundations of that civilisation.
Gary’s YouTube channel which addresses all this is here.
Well this was actually pretty good… very little crazy right wing stuff - none in fact - some light criticism of wokeness and a consensus that Hitler was a socialist or communist dictator not a rightwing liberal fascist - mercifully no discussion of Greenland Panama or Canada
The bit at the end was actually quite nice and agreement about ending the wars in Gaza and Ukraine.
Importantly and probably deliberately there was very little to zero overt electioneering - a little bit of criticism of Weidel’s Spitzencandidat competition from Weidle but nothing extreme.
So nothing imo that could be seen as being election interference IMO - nor any reason for the DSA to be concerned or to get involved.
I didn’t even hear any particularly overt endorsement that went beyond that you might hear in passing in a podcast interview.
It ended with a discussion of mars - Elon’s favourite subject of conversation - which was quite interesting including a reference to the Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy series and Douglas Adams.
From Weidel’s point of view though there was a lot of positive moderate exposure of her party and probably around 200k + listeners. Which may give her a bounce in the polls.
Also the final segment talking about space was quite delightful and genuine and portrayed the AFD Leader in a positive light.
And I’d say the two of them have both found a new friend.
This is an update thread on this OCCRP story on @StateDept and @USAID funding for several large investigative journalism projects which has had a lot of downstream impacts it seems. Especially in Europe,
The underlying original story about govt funding for investigative journalism projects was initially flagged by @ryangrim.
This organisation - OCCRP that not many people seemed to have been aware of - was responsible for a series of outstanding investigative journalism consortia projects including the Panama papers.
This is a leaked rough cut of the NDR (German public broadcaster north west Germany) investigation into what happened With the OCCRP story.
It was never officially published but was recently leaked publicly by Wikileaks.
With the benefit of hindsight arguably Wikileaks ought to be the international organisation that coordinates these large investigative consortia, though it’s not clear that they want to do so.
What is clear from the fallout from all of this is that the system that was in place for running these consortia is no longer fit for purpose.