Last three days have seen some, which is very welcome to address a 500 year drought. I posted the thread below on Aug 14th when rain finally came to Bretagne, France.
Its worth pointing out that an extreme drought in Europe is not as bad as elsewhere in the world. Europe is used to getting lots of rain, and will likely continue to do so - and it has good reservoirs to deal with drought - this one is basically from June.
This thread consists mostly of satellite imagery over the past three days + some forecast data images which help explain what is going on. But not too many. And it looks at water transport from the Nth Atl & the West African Monsoon.
Day 1. 13-14 August - East NATL
Day 1. 13-14 August - Western Europe
Day 1. 13-14 August - Western Sahara
In a sense the 1st and 3rd images can be seen as the causation for the 2nd one - you can see the visible atmospheric water flows (Note: there are also invisible ones).
Here's the first forecast data set. Precipitable water - Atmospheric water over Europe 14th-19th August (3 days forecast)
Day 2 of rain 14-15 August. Again we start in the Eastern North Atlantic where the lows are obstructing dry air from moving in. Theres also a 2nd atmospheric river over Bretagne.
The atmospheric river running WNW over Morocco is feeding the 2nd low over E.Eur.
East NATL
Day 2 (yesterday). 14-15 August - Western Europe
Neither low pressure system is making much of a go of forming into storm - but there are lots of thunderstorms.
Day 2 (yesterday). 14-15 August - Western Sahara.
The area of Atlantic convection which was just east of Senegal before powering one of atmospheric rivers which brought rains to France at the weekend is now mainly on an Italian Adriatic trajectory.
These three foreacasts (14/15/16 Aug) are all for Friday 19th Aug. The lows are expected to be pushed East - but not very fast.
Day 3 of rain 14-15 August: The low over the Bay of Biscay is doing a lot of work trying to form a circulation but thee wind from the south is blowing it north and keeping it ragged. This it evening it is bringing more rain to Galicia & Compostela in NW Spain (the wettest part).
Day 3 (last night and today). 15-16 August - Western Europe. Both lows are still working hard to try and stay in place but are struggling to do so with Southerly winds aloft dragging a lot of moisture north over Scandinavia. Big line of storms from northern Italy to Austria.
Day 3 (lastnight and today). 15-16 August - Western Sahara.
I'll keep updating this so long as the rain lasts. Europe is still very much in drought.
Here are the latest 3,5,10 and 16 day forecasts for accumulated rainfall. It looks as if Germany still has at least five days to wait but that after that it will get a fair few decent showers.
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.