On day 3 of #ArabianMonsoonBlast here's the view over the region tonight. This is definitely bringing rain, and lots of it to both Tigray and #GERD.
Today's rainfall forecasts follow.
Today's Big Pictures provide a view of the entire planet today in three images.
1. The Atlantic 2. The Pacific 3. Asia
Sometimes its helpful to take a broad view and remember that we are all on this planet together. And that we share the one amazing life giving biosphere.
I found another #MonsoonBurst in the pipeline, this time over the Western Pacific. One which shows very clearly that weird weather is now a universal phenomena in the Northern Hemisphere. And it all started with another Typhoon...
The forecasts for the area which is primarily addressed in this bulletin continue to be volatile in their detail. This seems to be a characteristic of extreme weather events, as the weather models learn from observation.
Here's a rainfall anomaly simulation for the next 16 days
It usefully highlights the aspects of this that are unusual. Rain in the #HornOfAfrica is not. #DesertRain in the Sahara and the rain over the Arabian Peninsula is, when compared with the 1981-2010 climate data set.
Here is another rainfall anomaly simulation, but this time over 46 days. Its from the European @ECMWF simulation (EPS ensemble model). The Euro model is noticeably the most conservative model in forecasting #DesertRain.
The view tonight over the Great Sahara Desert. If you look in the darkened area you can see the pipeline of moisture is moving over the #MiddleEast, the #HornOfAfrica and bringing its water deep into the Sahel already.
Today's 10-Day Rainfall forecasts for North Africa from July 14th through July 25th.
[All four models forecasts for #ArabianStorms have increased, so much show so that the Arabian Peninsula looks like an extension to the monsoon!]
48-hour rainfall forecasts (today and tomorrow from our standard four models: the European @ECMWF, U.S. @NOAA's GFS, Canada's CMC and the Korean KMA models. The last, skinniest, one is the ECMWF.
And finally for #NorthAfrica we have the long-range 16-day (GFS) and 12-day (KMA) forecasts - which remain remarkably well aligned.
We will have a better view of forecast rain over the southern Arabian Peninsula later in the bulletin.
The next three animations show the path of the #ArabianMonsoonBlast from India to the Sahara this morning. First leg across the Arabian Sea, and down through Pakistan.
.. oops not quite the right order. The starting point is here over India.
Here's the Arabian Peninsula leg, also from this morning.
And finally, the view as the stream of storm clouds arrived this morning in the Ethiopian Highlands.
48 Hour forecasts (today and tomorrow) from the same three models. Rains are now forecast in west and coastal #Somaliland in the KMA model, which seems plausible.
[@Somaalilanders if you have reports you can point to it would be interesting to see what is actually happening.]
This animation shows us an even wider view from this morning of the entire #WestAfricanMonsoon
Here's a closeup higher resolution view of today's #ArabianStorms. Its a complex phenomena operating in several layers over a very large area.
& more @Arab_Storms live reports of flooding and storms today. We will focus on the Arabian end of this bonkers weather, but the account is well worth a follow, it has extraordinary footage from all over the world.
A couple of bonus animations returning to the global eye perspective. Here we see 120 hours (5 days) of PWAT anomaly. So this is definitely lasting at least that long.
And my favourite plot of all the GFS North Atlantic PWAT simulation which corresponds to the previous one.
Its going to be very interesting to see whether that burst of PWAT heading north over Egypt brings rain to ever dry Egypt and Israel.
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.