Two typhoons getting closer and closer to each other. #INFA on the right is sucking the much smaller #Cempaka into its orbit. Sucking up all its outflow and chucking it out east.
The pair of typhoons current winds are fixed by JTWC at 70 and 65 knots at 06Z.
Here are the current warning graphics from the JTWC.
#Cempaka is a midget Typhoon (1). Spinning like a top south west of Hong Kong.
Disregarding its size, #Cempaka is directing rain from Hanoi to Taiwan (2). The forecast (3 & previous tweet) shows Cempaka moving west in a loop, but this hasn't started yet.
These two images are trying to capture the relative scale but do not really do so effectively.
So what's about to happen. This is the 20 06 GFS PWAT run for 180 hours. Landfall in Japan for the third storm is forecast overnight on the 24th-25th with high winds possibly arriving in time for the Olympics Opening Ceremony on the 23rd.
In this forecast the second phase of super moisture over Japan continues till August 1st.
Then in the final 4 days of the forecast things remain relatively benign. Over Japan.
1. Tokyo forecast rainfall before the storm 24th July
2. Tokyo forecast rainfall after the storm 29th July
1. Japan forecast rainfall before storm 24th July (108hrs)
2. Japan forecast rainfall after storm 29th July (240hrs)
3. Japan forecast rainfall after atmospheric moisture has cleared. 1 August (300 hrs)
[Note: Forecasts beyond 120 hours are subject to significant error.]
Disclaimer: This is not an official forecast and I am not a meteorologist. See the Joint Typhoon Warning Center for official advisories and warnings >> metoc.navy.mil/jtwc/jtwc.html
Once again today we had the peculiar site of a large storm at sunrise over the Arabian Peninsula and Horn of Africa.
And here's a view of the Indian Monsoon this evening India time.
In this image, also from @NASA, we can see the entire Nile. The GERD can be seen in there if you know where to look. With this mass of cloud it was a minor miracle that the dam was partially visible.
Today's big pictureshows a view across all of Asia and Africa in which the Indian & East Asian Monsoon are peaking. on the right there are two typhoons, #Cembaka and #INHA which are about to become one after they collide over Taiwan in a couple of days.
Today's 10-Day Rainfall forecasts for North Africa from July 20th through July 31st. The #ArabianMonsoonBurst is ongoing and can be seen on the far right of each rainfall forecast.
48-hour rainfall forecasts (today and tomorrow from our standard four models: the European @ECMWF, @NOAA's GFS, Canada's CMC and the Korean KMA models.
Finally for #NorthAfrica we have the long-range 16-day (GFS) and 12-day (KMA) forecasts which continue to show significant #DesertRain in the central Sahara.
Here we see a wider angle view of today's cloud movements over the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa from early this afternoon.
And this corresponding image shows us where the rain was this afternoon. There was a very big storm directly over Khartoum, and a lot of rain over Sudan. For a time there were also clouds covering most of the Aswan Dam.
And here's a closeup view of live rainstorms in this storm, which contained - as you can see - a lot of rain today.
Before the #MiddleEast forecasts here are a couple of #ArabSotrms observation tweets from today. In this first one I am not entirely sure what I am looking at. But it definitely looks dangerous. Its in #SaudiArabia today.
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.