Well its hard to know where to begin with today's #MiddleEast and #HornOfAfrica rainfall forecasts.
The action is now further north, and west. Here we see the consequences of the first phase of what appears to be becoming a continuous #WesternSaharaPlume.
An bit of a battle us underway between a high pressure system over Northern Erope and the plume which is entering at the bottom left in this image of Jetstream level 250Hpa 11km high winds.
While the model forecasts remain optimistic that an orderly jetstream may eventually appear, so far this has not happened. And in the meantime these winds are picking up moisture in the tropics and taking it in large quantities to places where its not expected.
Same animation time scale but this time of precipitable water. This is showing little sign of of becoming less unruly within the forecast time frame. And as water has significantly more mass/inertia than air, this could explain differences between forecast and observed weather.
One thing is going according to the script however. Today is the first day of the Indian subcontinent monsoon season and the forecasts show significant rainfall across all of India over the next 12 days.
The Atlantic Hurricane season officially begins today too and we have our first long range model prognostication. A storm in one of the favoured spots for formation, off the coast of Nicaragua, heading north.
At this range though this is hugely speculative.
Here's what the picture looked like last night.
In the east storms once again over the Red sea and around Medina. And in the west the #WesternSaharaPlume strengthening.
This morning the #WesternSaharaPlume is running hot bringing rain across Algeria, Spain & the Med. Rain is now forecast for where I am in Western France tonight and it looks like the rest of Western Europe will return to unseasonably wet conditions soon after.
Here are two more weather observations from this morning via @Meteoblue, the animations as always are from @zoom_earth
Here's a close up of the plume. The Eastern visible edge is moving at 100kph. On the western side clouds and storms are moving into France at 20-30kph.
This GEFS ensemble 15 day animation models what is expected to follow. And this means a lot more rain. France's rivers are already running fairly high as are those in the east.
The result is water water everywhere. Albeit of the kind you can drink.
Again this is a 16 day forecast from the GEFS ensemble model.
Meanwhile in Eastern Africa the #EastAfricaPlume which has resulted in rain in northern #Sudan#Egypt and #SaudiArabia has stopped but a new one may well be developing over Chad. You need to look closely as the cloud signals are fairly minor at the moment.
Wile the monsoon itself is marching westwards. Higher altitude winds - those that appear to be carrying these water streams - produced by the storm activity in Chad - are moving east, and turn north over #Sudan. Admittedly this is just a guess as to what is going on.
And finally the long range rainfall forecasts.....
Here are today's June 1st North Africa accumulated forecasts, in descending order of #DesertRain intensity. The CMC forecast is now consistently showing 1mm of rain on average per day over a large portion of the Western Sahara.
A view of Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa from this morning from @NASA's Modis satellite.
1 June 10-day rain (+ 12 day KMA) forecasts for the #HornOfAfrica. The intensity of rain in the 12 day KMA forecast looks like what the Blue Nile historically delivers.
A selection of storm videos from around the world follow. The first from New Zealand, my home, where a freakish tropical moisture driven storm came close to causing significantly more catastrophic damage than what you see here.
And our final regular accumulated rainfall forecasts for today, ultra long-range forecasts from the GFS & its ensemble counterpart GEFS (16 Day) and the KMA (12 Day) models.
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.
This video is about the work done by the “terrorist” who drove through the Magdeburg Christmas Market tonight at high speed killing injuring around 100 people.
How does a doctor practicing as a psychiatrist go from being a women’s rights defender focussed on Assisting Islamic women to escape an oppressive culture to being a multi murderer in his adopted country.
Meet @DrTalebJawad
A very unusual terrorist.
A good starting point for those interested in getting closer to the truth about what happened tonight is to visit @DrTalebJawad ‘s Twitter profile and look at his recent messages before the account gets locked.
It is immediately apparent that this is not your normal Islamic terrorist, in fact it quickly becomes apparent from his tweets that he was likely suffering from a psychotic break or something similar before he committed the horrific act of terrorism in Magdeburg.
This incident took place in Magdeburg a city relatively near to where I am currently in Eastern Germany. It was fairly late evening. But the news exploded locally very quickly on Twitter.
And the initial speculation was of course that the terrorist was Islamic and that it was another planned terror attack.
At this point several hours later however it looks like the perpetrator was having an accrue psychological break.