With Cyclone #Yaas soaking up all the moisture east of the #MiddleEast and #HornOfAfrica it was a relatively calm day. Albeit not without another intense set of storms along the Red Sea Coast in the Jinzan mountains.
Today's rainfall forecasts follow.
The days began relatively quiet on the #WestAfricanMonsoon front thanks to Cyclone #Yaas. This image shows a strip from the Libyan Coast across the Sahara down to the Congo.
And it remained fairly quiet over the great forests of equatorial Africa today. But further West over the Ivory Coast and the West Sahara the #WestAfricaWaterPlume continued to pump water vapour across the Sahara into Europe.
In the morning as you see in the image above it appeared fairly subdued by by nightfall the scale of the water vapour transport was far more apparent.
Here are three views of what the weather models thought was going around the time of the @Zoom_Earth animation above.
And in this animation you can see the impact of this #WestAfricaWaterPlume further north this evening.
This is a picture of the intense rain/storm activity underway over North Eastern Europe.
The attached tweet thread shows the 1st wave of this last night, over northern Italy and Western Europe. TLDR version >> its making it cold wet and windy all over.
Here are today's 10 day rain forecasts for North Africa. Note the extent of forecast rain in the CMC and KMA models for the Western Sahara. This is set to be a long event from the look of things.
25th May 10-day rain forecasts for the #HornOfAfrica remain subdued, seemingly because of the influence of Cyclone #Yaas. That said there is a difference of opinion on magnitude.
3-day forecasts for the same area show rain expected till midnight Friday by the ECMWF, GFS and KMA models. Given the rains so far during the "little rainy" season in the Horn I expect this is fairly welcome.
The first of these two images of #Yemen, #Eritrea, #Ethiopia and #Somaliland is from 11th March, the second from today. Fresh green growth can be clearly seen. Note: The resolution of the image is 1 pixel per km2.
May 25th, 10 day accumulated rain forecasts for the #MiddleEast from the GFS, ECMWF, CMC & KMA weather models.
And 3-Day forecasts to midnight Friday. Looking at these and comparing them with what is happening one gets the impression the weather modelers are occupied by bigger issues that #ArabianStorms.
Today's #ArabianStorms were non trivial, and if you look closely reveal significant complexity to the wind directions over the area. The resumption of storm activity along the Western side of the Red Sea is also a new feature.
The #MiddleEast long-range 16 day and 12 day forecasts from the GFS and KMA models. Again we have the last two runs from each model here.
I attended the Bonn climate talks. They were very disappointing to everyone. The elephant in the room was (of course) the U.S. decision to withdraw from the talks altogether.
Unfortunately.. perhaps intentionally in advance of the continuation of climate talks regardless of #US_Disintigration the talks were also very sparsely attended particularly by activists and NGOs. The reason for this was @elonmusk destroying @-USAID.
@elonmusk As you can see the USAID Twitter account is now dead - deleted which is an appalling act of vandalism executed by Elon and his tech-bro team of teenagers.
This article is deeply depressing. For my part at Scoop.co.nz it is clear to me that:
1. The Govt has a deliberate strategy - probably not official but nevertheless operative to destroy NZ media. 2. This is not going to change any time soon. thespinoff.co.nz/politics/02-07…
& Sadly from what I discerned last year the @nzlabour opposition is both apathetic and indifferent to the plight of media. Also the @NZGreens. And have always been so for as long as I can remember.
This is extremely disappointing
@nzlabour @NZGreens I will be returning to NZ in August to ensure continues to function in these very difficult times for NZ media. We have faced numerous big challenges recently and thank our supporters and readers for their support.Scoop.co.nz
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.