Today's big picture is a dramatic shot of the Sahara at sunset with a massive storm over Mali and a line of clouds from the heart of Algeria's desert south east to Chad. On the right you can see tonight's storms over the #Ethiopia highlands.
The rainfall in the Western Sahara has just started but it has a few more days to run. In this animation of a simulation you see the precipitable water anomaly, which highlights areas which have much more water than normal for this time of year.
This over the same period, 88 hours, shows the overall water picture in the North Western hemisphere and you can see how water flowing south from the eastern Mediterranean is contributing some of the moisture which is creating these desert storms in the west Sahara.
See previous tweet ^^ the #EuropeBigWet is about to enter another peak phase.
The overall picture shows: 1. Monsoon moving west along the equator, 2. Atlantic picking it up and propelling it over the U.S. and Nth Atl. at Europe.
& now we can see some of it is looping back.
Today's 10-Day Rainfall forecasts for North Africa from July 9th through July 20th. On the left hand side of the plots you can see significant #DesertRain is forecast over Mali due to the processes described earlier.
48-hour rainfall forecasts (today and tomorrow from the same four models: the Euro @ECMWF, U.S. @NOAA's GFS, Canada's CMC and the Korean KMA models.
These plots show that rain in Mali is about to begin.
And finally for #NorthAfrica we have the long-range 16-day (GFS) and 12-day (KMA) forecasts - which remain remarkably well aligned.
You will get a better view of the forecast rain over the southern Arabian Peninsula later in the bulletin.
4 @NASA satellite images showing the monsoon process this morning. 1. The big storm over Mali today 2. The Indian monsoon where a lot of this water is being elevated into the jet stream 3. The heart of the Nile's rain basin 4. A traces of the monsoon jets over the Arabian Sea
This animation shows the storms coming up today over the Horn of Africa in Ethiopia's mountains.
48 Hour forecasts (today and tomorrow) from the same three models. Rains are now forecast in the west of #Somaliland
Today's #ArabianStorms were not very intense but they did see some unusual new cloud formations, possibly indicating high altitude water transport en route to join the rain making efforts over Sudan and Chad.
The 10-Day accumulated rain forecasts for the #MiddleEast from the GFS, CMC, KMA & ACG weather models are showing increasingly more #DesertRain in #Yemen and #Oman.
These rainfall forecasts are long-range July 9th rainfall forecasts. The16-day GFS & GEFS models, the 12 day KMA and the 15 day EPS (Euro ensemble) model forecasts for the #MiddleEast.
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.