See four satellite images taken today of major water transport events from @NASA Modis below. 1. Monsoon winds leaving India 2. Monsoon winds arriving Africa 3. Closeup of the #HornOfAfrica 4. The latest WMA plume.
Today's #Africa and #Middle East rainfall forecasts follow.
Two views of today's heavy rainfall in the Nile Basin and along the Red Sea Coast.
A big picture view from the Atlantic to the Bay of Bengal. It is extraordinary how long the Leviathan storm has been stationary in the middle of the picture near the Black Sea. It started in late May!
The even bigger picture:
In the latest #EuropeBigWet update I discuss the global perspective. It appears now that the entire Northern Hemisphere has unusually high levels of atmospheric moisture this year.
Today's North Africa 10-Day rainfall forecasts for June 19th.
48-Hour North Africa/Sahara ainfall forecasts from four models, this time including the ECMWF.
A satellite image of today's rains in the Ethiopian Highlands which are as strong as they have ever been so far this year. Rains are also strong over the Tigray region today.
These rains feed the Abbay river and provide the majority of water to the Nile's flow each year.
And finally, June 18th 16-day (GFS) and 12-day (KMA) accumulated rainfall forecasts for the Middle East.
Rainfall on the Arabian Peninsula looks set to continue.
[Note: Several long range forecasts now show rainfall on the Southern Yemen Coast.]
الله أعلم
As we are now keeping a close eye on the monsoon winds here are two sets of side by side comparisons in PWAT (GFS and ECMWF) for the source area over India for today and midnight Friday next week.
The other factor in the strength and direction of the East Africa Monsoon transport wind. Again two sets of side by side comparison from GFS and ECMWF. They show today and next Friday at midnight.
In these forecasts we see: 1. An increase in the strength of the source PWAT moisture.
& 2. Increasing strength and better directionality in the transport winds.
We shall see what happens :)
By then we should also have the first democratically elected Government in Ethiopia, elected in a freely contested election, albeit one being held under somewhat complicated circumstances.
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.