The magnitude of #ArabianMonsoonBurst is now apparent. A major storm is about to cross the Red Sea and arrive in the #HornOfAfrica. Behind it are two enormous super-cell thunderstorms.
Today's rainfall forecasts follow.
The rain activity shown in the @zoom_earth animation preceding is only radar based, Saudi radar, and in this case is complementary to the @Meteoblue satellite rainfall estimates you see below. There is likely significantly more rainfall in this than you see here.
Here we see India (the heart of this Monsoon), this morning to 10am East Africa Time. I.E. around seven hours ago.
And here a wider view over the Arabian Sea showing the water transport more clearly, which, interestingly is going in both directions. And which may be self reinforcing this process.
The first four GFS PWAT plots today take us to 4am in the morning (they show 10am 4pm 10pm and 4am respectively.
The first thing I notice is there is barely any difference between them. The intensity drops slightly tonight, but that's all.
Here we see the GFS simulation of the PWAT parameter for five days in six hour increments. It peaks after 48 hours (Sunday Night) and then falls away. And the primary trajectory of the water seen here is North West up the Gulf of Arabia.
However as we can see in the satellite imagery this is a multi-layered phenomena we are witnessing with water going in multiple different directions.
The Canadian CMC version of the same PWAT simulation (five days) is at higher resolution and shows a bit more subtlety. It also seems to more closely match what we are actually seeing today at the front end.
Importantly it doesn't show the event decaying nearly as quickly.
And we have a third-way version from the European @ECMWF model.
Extreme weather events, and this is a spectacular one are extremely difficult to model. And in the end as those who live in the region would say, and God knows best.
الله أعلم
Today's big picture takes in all of this plus the ongoing extreme rain event in Europe which while much smaller has already claimed more than 100 lives.
Today's 10-Day Rainfall forecasts for North Africa from July 16th through July 27th. The #ArabianMonsoonBurst can be seen very clearly on the far right of the four accumulated rainfall forecasts.
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.
[NOTE: We will have a better view of forecast rain over the southern Arabian Peninsula later in the bulletin.]
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.
A near live view over the area tonight, as of an hour and a half ago. At the bottom you can see Lake Victoria, the source of the White Nile. This image covers all of the Nile's rainfall basins.
And finally we have today's long-range #MiddleEast July 14th rainfall forecasts.
The16-day GFS & GEFS models, the 12 day KMA and the 15 day EPS (Euro ensemble) model forecasts.
UAE rainfall is in the frame in all models & as we saw earlier it is already getting it.
الله أعلم
The GFS (latest complete run) is now the simulation showing the least amount of rain among all these models over 16 days. It will be interesting if the ohter models come into line on this.
NOTE: The GFS has far and away the most sophisticated and tested global model at present.
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.