Spaghetti guidance is tightly clustered on Charleston landfall. After moving inland a very sharp turn W/SW is expected with some models even predicting a return back to the Carolina coast.
Tropical rain all the way to the Great Lakes is possible/likely given the size of Ian.
Intensity guidance is very clear that the storm is expected to weaken - based on landfall today. This will change rapidly if Ian does not weaken or landfall quickly.
Two hour Satellite loop via @TropicalTidbits showing a burst of convection over the South Carolina coast. Note however that landfall of the center of #Hurricane Ian is still 4-11 hours away. Its going to be a long day.
Back to the issue of forecast uncertainty. This data is from Windy which gets data feeds directly from the models. The issue here is that these three models completely disagree about the current center of circulation.
Only the HRRR model runs hourly (i.e. its initialisation data is the most up to date. The torm looks ragged. But this definitely suggests it is strengthening. But on this trajectory, it seems unlikely that it will make landfall at Charleston.
With that in mind, here's the latest HRRR model run. But bear in mind. Its initialisation data is only as good as NOAA/NHC's weather data, and it is probably not realtime. The model appears to be tuned to learn on each run from error.
With the sun coming up we should finally able to fix an accurate center of rotation for the circulation. On the left is a guess (improvements welcome). On the right are: 1. The HRRR's forecast 0 hour, 7am EDT] 2. HRRR's #HurricaneIANlandfall location at 5pm EDT - Myrtle Beach.
Ok so nature is terrifying
Right: Latest Hurricane Wind Probabilities
Left: Satellite Presentation on sunrise (Note: this is 30 minutes delayed).
It looks like #HurricaneIAN has strengthened a lot - and is in the process of trying to form an eyewall.
#HurricaneIAN's astonishing expanding rain impacts.
This is a three hour radar animation.
While this is driven by the hurricane, the stream of water and storms coming in across the North Carolina coast near Jacksonville is due to an atmospheric river.
96 hour anumation which provides a view of how long this East Coast US #HurricaneIAN rain event will persist. The strength of the hurricane at landfall (which is hard to predict) may affect this model forecast.
The Nam-Conus model is currently forecasting 2 unches of rain all the way up the coast to New England and as far west as Eastern Ohio.
As you can see in the previous tweets ^^ rain from #HurricaneIan is arriving now in Washington DC.
A 60 hour accumulating rainfall forecast for the Carolinas.
#HurricaneIAN The next 30 hours look seriously intense Carolinas. Stay Safe.
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.