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).
THREAD: Some thoughts on October 7th and the importance of their being global transparency over what we know about what really happened on that terrible day.
1/ This (see screenshots in the first few posts in this thread) is one of the most important pieces of conflict related journalism published in recent years.
It relates to the orders given to soldiers on October 7th to fire on any vehicle seeking to return to the Gaza Strip to prevent the taking of hostages and was published on July 7th, 10 months later in Haaretz.
2/ As @IsraeliPM Benjamin Netanyahu prepares to address congress it is vital that the public in the US, Israel and globally is fully aware of what exactly happened on October 7th in Gaza.
3/ The account in this story published by Haaretz is at this time still behind a paywall and it has therefore not been read by the very large number of people who ought to have done so. I have not seen very many reports containing the detail of this report elsewhere though I presume there are many.
OK so clearly #HurricaneBeryl is not the same as #HurricaneHarvey. But there are some striking similarities in terms of what has made it so much more persistent than either forecast or as modeled.
This thread is going to look at this issue a bit more deeply.
- The overall cloud mass of the #HurricaneBeryl thunderstorm complex proved much more resilient than expected once it came over land. Why?
- Also Like #Harvey Beryl did slow down after making landfall and continued to spin over land. Why?
- I think the answer to both questions relates to the very warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Like Harvey back in 2017, Beryl has been fueled by a constant stream of warm wet atmospheric flows of energy off of the Gulf of Mexico.
- This is obvious in part simply from observing the astonishing expansion of the cloud field after #Beryl made landfall early this morning.
A clue to understanding this can be found in looking at the the astonishing growth progression of #HurricaneBeryl's cloud field over landafter Beryl strengthened and formed itself into a Hurricane in the period after making landfall south of Houston.
Over the course of the rest of the morning you can see in these images how much the wind field expanded.
Like Harvey #Beryl also grew and strengthened itself by feeding off of the gulf of mexico, specifically the area between the Texas coastline and what looks like the outer boundary of the convection field which expanded extremely strongly to the north.
The only source for all this additional atmospheric moisture can be the oceanic convection which took place in what is a fairly clearly bounded 136,000 km2 area of ocean which as you can see in this animation is very closely bound to the rest of the circulation.
This is a much much larger area than the area of active rainfall which settled over the city and metropolis of Houston for the morning and which is finally starting to move off to the north now.
This version of the graphic shows the comparative sizes of the area of water which is responsible for the astonitising growth of post landfall #HurricaneBeryl - and the area of the storm that remained over the ocean and which is almost certainly responsible for both why this storm was so persistent and why it (like Harvey) slowed down after coming ashore.
#HurricaneBerylis not expected to give up lightly as it moves onshore and turns north eastward over Texas and then heads north east across the great planes towards the great lakes.
Typically we expect hurricanes to weaken rapidly over land - especially wind wise. But #Berylis not forecast to behave as normal - probably because like Harvey, its tail over the Gulf is keeping it fueled. - the currently forecast pattern from Fox News's exclusive model shown in these images was present in some of the simulations of Beryl after it crossed the Yucutan a couple of days ago.
To my mind questions ought to be asked about the accuracy of the forecasting for this storm, as - like the last super destructive Texas Hurricane, Harvey in 2017 [] Beryl is proving to be a LOT more destructive in its impacts than initially forecast.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane…
The final image in this sequence of screenshots of Fox Weather Graphics is worth drawing attention to as it shows how much broader the impacts of this hurricane are expected to be as it moves across the great planes roughly speaking heading up the Mississippi river, and continuing to dump potential flooding rain as it goes.
This image shows the forecast expected severe weather threat from the remnants of #HurricaneBeryl in Arkansas and Missouri up as far as Saint Louis.
ALERT: High Target News Environment in play - numerous consequential news events with global implications.
1. British elections - (Thursday July 4th-Friday July 5th): Delivering an unprecedented landslide win to the left's @UKLabour Party + strong showings for the Liberals and Greens . The UK Chancellor @RachelReevesMP will shortly set out her economic policy in a speech.
2. French elections (Sunday July 7th) deliver a remarkable 2nd big win for the left in politics in France - dashing the hopes of Marine le Pen's hard right wing "Rassemblement National" of first parliamentary victory
3. Overnight (7th-8th July): an unprecedented huge Hurricane , #Hurricane Beryl - makes landfall in Houston as a Category 1 Hurricane, its main threat to the epicenter of the global fossil fuel industry will be flooding. It is still night in Houston at present.
Hmmmmmm…. Why is the audio of the @youtube version of the UNSG office daily briefing for 1st July missing sound from 5:24 to 6:07?
Afghanistan, Lebanon, Myanmar & other topics - Daily Press Briefing (1 J... via @YouTube
The content of this portion is available as it is simply a quote from written remarks of UNSG @antonioguterres made to a meeting in Austria. But the missing YouTube audio is unprecedented in my experience and hard to explain.