North Africa, East Africa and Middle East Long Range Rain Update Thread: 27 March-April 13.
A forecast burst in West African / Amazon Monsoon activity noted in the Equinox Weather update is now underway, and forecasts now show #DesertRain in the Sahara & Sahel.
Here's a high resolution @NASA satellite image of the bust of monsoon water moving north east across the Sahara from the equatorial Atlantic off the West African Coast.
This burst of what is set to bring rain to Ukraine shortly.
This forecast animation shows the impact of the front of this water transit event in Europe. The Saharan event is closely followed by a storm coming in from the Atlantic which will bring an end to recent very settled weather in Europe.
This weather activity is similar to what we saw last year, albeit later in the year (quoted tweet) - a month later. It's origins can be found in the north Amazon Rain Forest which is undergoing a sudden increase in convective storm activity.
This wider angle longer animation shows the full picture, where a large area of convection off the coast of Guinea is also making a significant contribution. Water sent high up into the atmosphere by thunderstorms has been picked up by upper atmosphere jet-stream winds.
The next three tweets contain animations from the @NOAA GFS3 model forecasting the path of this event building over the next 16 days. Again, whilst Sahel Cauldron like monsoon activity took place in 2020, it came later.
The forecast above shows the raw precipitable water data over 16 days. This one adds water transport direction and sea level pressure contours. The real processes are more complex as you can see in the satellite imagery with clouds moving in different directions.
Finally we see the rainfall solution forecast from this data by the GFS model.
This 240 hour forecast from 29 May 2021 shows similar activity, and provides an anecdotal comparison of a similar event albeit a full month later in the year.... though its noteworthy that there is less rain in this Sahel rain forecast than there is in today's (2nd image).
Here are yesterday's long range rain forecasts (1-3 show 10 days) for the Horn of Africa from three models. The European ECMWF, US GFS and Korean KMA models - the last image shows a 12 day KMA forecast.
The heaviest East African Monsoon rains are not due to arrive till July, but we can already see lots of cloud activity - and rains building especially further West. This image shows the picture yesterday over 24 hours.
And this animation shows the last 24 hours i.e. overnight from the 27th-28th March.
North African 10 day rainfall forecasts from yesterday from four models, the GFS, ECMWF, KMA and CMC. The later two models tend to forecast more rain over the Sahara, and often proved correct about this last year. Saharan rain is hard to forecast.
Looking back into the 2021 archives this rain event in Algeria on March 9th-14th was also fairly spectacular.
For now the Middle East rain forecasts remain modest, but there is still some precipitation expected in the north over Syria and Iraq.
This is partly due to Atlantic storms over the Mediterranean which are associated with this water transit event. The one on the right here is at the tip of plume which was generated by yesterday's storm off the Gulf of Guinea.
These four 10 day Europe model rain forecasts show expected impacts in Europe from the monsoon plume.
The rain impact on Ukraine is notable as it follows several days of warm weather and may make the ground boggy for tanks (see attached thread from 23/3).
This is pathetic from @realDonaldTrump he’s lashing out like an angry teenager. Jerome Powell says he’s included a the costs of a building that was completed years ago in his very public attack on the FED Chair.
Trump has completely lost the plot. The single most damaging thing that he could do to undermine confidence in the U.S. dollar (which he publicly claims to want to deflate and there by make all Americans poorer - is to attack the Federal Reserve and the SEC.
@realDonaldTrump Trump is setting fire to the dollar to distract from his Epstein mess what a complete baby.
I attended the Bonn climate talks. They were very disappointing to everyone. The elephant in the room was (of course) the U.S. decision to withdraw from the talks altogether.
Unfortunately.. perhaps intentionally in advance of the continuation of climate talks regardless of #US_Disintigration the talks were also very sparsely attended particularly by activists and NGOs. The reason for this was @elonmusk destroying @-USAID.
@elonmusk As you can see the USAID Twitter account is now dead - deleted which is an appalling act of vandalism executed by Elon and his tech-bro team of teenagers.
This article is deeply depressing. For my part at Scoop.co.nz it is clear to me that:
1. The Govt has a deliberate strategy - probably not official but nevertheless operative to destroy NZ media. 2. This is not going to change any time soon. thespinoff.co.nz/politics/02-07…
& Sadly from what I discerned last year the @nzlabour opposition is both apathetic and indifferent to the plight of media. Also the @NZGreens. And have always been so for as long as I can remember.
This is extremely disappointing
@nzlabour @NZGreens I will be returning to NZ in August to ensure continues to function in these very difficult times for NZ media. We have faced numerous big challenges recently and thank our supporters and readers for their support.Scoop.co.nz
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.