Cyclone 92p has now formed north east of New Caledonia and here you can see in the satellite imagery how an atmospheric river generated from its outflows is strengthening and heading towards NZ's West Coast.
Whilst the formation of a Cyclone in this position has been predicted in the models for a long time, its formation is uncertain until it happens, and a critical point in the unfolding story of this #KiwiDeluge.
In this animation you can see the circulation form and its size.
Towards the end of the animation you can also see that it has started to move south eastwards, also as predicted.
This animation shows the broader picture across the tropics, an area on the RHT here (roughly over Tonga) is also playing an important role in this.
This Water Vapour Transport animation from @weathermodels_ shows the next three days and you can see how the second low over Tonga is helping to consolidate the atmospheric moisture generated in the area into a single large stream.
^^ That was a partial plot to make it easier to follow here is the MLSP (isobars) animation from the latest GFS3 model this evening, you can see how the low over Tonga is effectively dragged into the cyclone which moves south and weakens rapidly over the Tasman Sea.
The PWAT (atmospheric water - which is a correlate for engergy) forecast is IMO the most helpful to understand at a glance what is going on. Cyclone #Dovi (not yet officially named) is a cyclone embedded in a massive area of moisture. It is not normal, discrete, cyclone.
Unfortunately for meteorologists - and us their customers, the complexity of having a cyclone embedded in the middle of large area of convective storms means that this event will be very hard to forecast.
These are the latest GEFS (US) and EPS (Euro) ensemble "Spaghetti" forecasts for #Invest92P/#Dovi.
Compared to earlier simulation runs these ones show this storm at greater intensity, especially over the next few days. The two models do however seem to be in broad agreement.
And the new consensus is that the storm will move slower than previously expected and be stronger. The end of this latest #ExtremeWeather event is now predicted to be around Feb 15th rather than Feb 12th.
The next big reveal will be the assessment by the US Navy's JTWC Joint Typhoon Warning Center metoc.navy.mil/jtwc/jtwc.html
So far they have only issued a statement saying that Cyclone Genesis has occurred with no track or intensity guidance.
The JTWC hasn't declared this to be a cyclone yet, just that they consider it's formation possible. But from the satellite presentation I think a cyclone has formed. This warning says they will update their view on this before 3pm NZT today.
Due to the unpredictability of the path and intensity of cyclones beyond three days its impossible to know what the rain and wind impact of this tropical storm will be over the coming week. But these four latest 180 hour rainfall maps are fairly consistent.
And it is clear that NZ faces a major threat from this #ExtremeWeather event.
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.