Air Temperatures The following maximum temperatures (F) were recorded across the state of Hawaii Sunday…along with the minimum temperatures Sunday:

82 – 63  Lihue, Kauai
79 – 63  Honolulu, Oahu
78 55  Molokai AP
82 – 59  Kahului, Maui
80 – 64  Kailua Kona
82 – 65  Hilo, Hawaii

Here are the latest 24-hour precipitation totals (inches) for each of the islands, as of Sunday evening:


0.02  Kilohana, Kauai
0.01  Schofield east, Oahu
0.02  Molokai
0.00  Lanai
0.00  Kahoolawe
0.00  Maui
0.06  Kawainui Stream, Big Island


The following numbers represent the strongest wind gusts (mph)…as of Sunday evening:


14  Poipu, Kauai – SW
13  Wheeler AAF, Oahu – NW
09  Molokai – SE
12  LanaiSW
09  Kahoolawe – SSW
13  Hana, Maui
– NW
13  Upolu AP, Big IslandSW


Hawaii’s MountainsHere’s a link to the live web cam on the summit of near 13,800 foot Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. This web cam is available during the daylight hours here in the islands…and when there’s a big moon shining down during the night at times. Plus, during the nights you will be able to see stars, and the sunrise and sunset too… depending upon weather conditions.



Aloha Paragraphs

 

http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/goes/west/cpac/ir4.jpg
A cold front is moving by…not far to the north and
northwest of the state


http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/goes/west/hi/ir4.jpg
Mostly clear with cloudy areas…scattered
clouds offshore waters


http://radar.weather.gov/Conus/RadarImg/hawaii.gif

Limited light showers…at best



~~~ Hawaii Weather Narrative
~~~


High Surf Advisory
…north and west shores of Kauai, Oahu, Molokai,
and for north shores of Maui – starting at noon / Small Craft Advisory

 

Light southeasterly breezes…turning south to southwest over Kauai and probably Oahu. Here’s the latest weather map, showing the Hawaiian Islands, and the rest of the North Pacific Ocean, along with a real-time wind profiler of the central Pacific. We find a high pressure system far to the northeast, with its associated high pressure ridge trailing back to the southwest…over the islands. At the same time, we have low pressure systems well to the northwest through northeast, with the tail-end of an associated cold front draping southwestward. We’ll find light winds…with daytime sea breezes through the next few days. Those areas that are exposed to light southeasterly breezes will see localized volcanic haze (vog). The light winds will continue through early Wednesday, with strengthening south to southwest breezes arriving thereafter…thanks to an approaching cold front.

Rainfall will remain limited…with just a few showers here and there. Here’s the looping radar image showing just a few showers across our area. We’ll see our winds remaining light, carrying a few light showers. At the same time, these light winds will prompt clear to partly cloudy mornings, giving way to afternoon upcountry clouds…although showers will be spotty and generally light. The cold front moving by to the north, has pushed a high pressure ridge down over the islands. This in turn will continue the light winds, and keep a mostly dry weather pattern in place. A cold front will approach later in the week, and may bring some clouds and showers our way by Friday into Saturday. I’ll be back with more updates on all of the above, I hope you have a great Sunday night wherever you’re spending it! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Friday Evening Film: As is often the case, there were many good films to pick from this week. I’d like to see Wild with Reese Witherspoon before it leaves town, and the new one with Bradley Cooper and Sienna Miller looks really good too…not to mention Hunger Games: The Mockingjay. However, and largely due to my neighbor Jeff’s enthusiasm about this film, we’re going to see Inherent Vice, starring Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, Owen Wilson, Reese Witherspoon, Katherine Waterston, Benicio Del Toro, Jena Malone, Martin Short, Serena Scott Thomas…among many others.

The Synopsis: “Inherent Vice,” is the seventh feature from Paul Thomas Anderson and the first ever film adaption of a Thomas Pynchon novel. When private eye Doc Sportello’s ex-old lady suddenly out of nowhere shows up with a story about her current billionaire land developer boyfriend whom she just happens to be in love with, and a plot by his wife and her boyfriend to kidnap that billionaire and throw him in a looney bin…well, easy for her to say. It’s the tail end of the psychedelic `60s and paranoia is running the day and Doc knows that “love” is another of those words going around at the moment, like “trip” or “groovy,” that’s being way too overused – except this one usually leads to trouble. With a cast of characters that includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, LAPD Detectives, a tenor sax player working undercover, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists… Part surf noir, part psychedelic romp – all Thomas Pynchon.

This film looked good, maybe really good, at least according to the trailer. Jeff and I ended up seeing the film with a couple lady friends of ours, and there turned out to be a wide disparity between our individual responses. It was a strangely funny film, filled with a fog of marijuana smoke…romping through a period of the late 60’s into the early 1970’s. The acting was great in my opinion, although it fell short in terms of a plot…like off a steep cliff in fact. The film was well over two hours long, and I enjoyed it all the way through…although several of our group took short naps at times. Joaquin Phoenix carried the film enormously, and seemed perfectly cast, in his perpetually befuddled way. The stoner humor was thick, and there was no lack of nudity…not to mention the sex, profanity, and of course there was some violence too. One critic said: “Great acting salts this complex mystery involving drug-addled bottom feeders in 1970s Los Angeles. It goes nowhere but typical of Paul Thomas Anderson, nowhere is riveting.” Ok, ok, here’s our grades, I gave it an A-, Jeff a B+, and the two ladies gave it a C rating…almost reluctantly. Don’t take your kids to this film, and likely, many of you will give this film a pass. Although I should say, there are those of you out there that will love this trippy flash back to earlier times in life!

Saturday Evening Film: Well, I didn’t really have anything going on, so I decided to head back down to Kahului for yet another new film. This time it was to see Wild, starring Reese Witherspoon, Michiel Huisman, Thomas Sadoski, Gaby Hoffman, Laura Dern…among many others. The synopsis: with the dissolution of her marriage and the death of her mother, Cheryl Strayed has lost all hope. After years of reckless, destructive behavior, she makes a rash decision. With absolutely no experience, driven only by sheer determination, Cheryl hikes more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, alone. WILD powerfully captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddens, strengthens, and ultimately heals her.

This film turned out to be so good, bringing me to tears at times…and feeling elated at others. Obviously, Reese Witherspoon was the primary actor in this film. It was interesting to see her so deglamorized, with no hesitancy to get deep into this role. This was a rich film full of nature, showing how the great out of doors had its way with our hero…which was very inspirational for me. This wasn’t what you might expect, being some light adventure story, with pretty scenery…although there was some of that. On the other hand, Witherspoon was foul-mouthed, very down and dirty…besides being tender, broken and strong. The story was full of genuine feeling, ranging between low spots based on her horrible life choices and tragedies, and life’s high points when communing with something as deep and satisfying as yourself in nature. At the core of this great film was the relationship between a daughter and her Mother, which was very touching. As for a grade, I’m going with another A-. Here’s the trailer, which gives you a good sense of what the film makes available to the viewer.



World-wide tropical cyclone activity:


>>>
Atlantic Ocean:
The last regularly scheduled Tropical Weather Outlook of the 2014 Atlantic hurricane season…has occurred. Routine issuance of the Tropical Weather Outlook will resume on June 1, 2015. During the off-season, Special Tropical Weather Outlooks will be issued as conditions warrant.


Here’s a satellite image of the Atlantic Ocean

>>> Caribbean Sea:
The last regularly scheduled Tropical Weather Outlook of the 2014 Atlantic hurricane season…has occurred. Routine issuance of the Tropical Weather Outlook will resume on June 1, 2015. During the off-season, Special Tropical Weather Outlooks will be issued as conditions warrant.


>>> Gulf of Mexico:
The last regularly scheduled Tropical Weather Outlook of the 2014 Atlantic hurricane season…has occurred. Routine issuance of the Tropical Weather Outlook will resume on June 1, 2015. During the off-season, Special Tropical Weather Outlooks will be issued as conditions warrant.


Here’s a satellite image of the Caribbean Sea…and the Gulf of Mexico.

>>> Eastern Pacific: The last regularly scheduled Tropical Weather Outlook of the 2014 North Pacific hurricane season…has occurred. Routine issuance of the Tropical Weather Outlook will resume on May 15, 2015. During the off-season, Special Tropical Weather Outlooks will be issued as conditions warrant.


Here’s a wide satellite image that covers the entire area between Mexico, out through the central Pacific…to the International Dateline.


Here’s the link to the National Hurricane Center (NHC)


>>> Central Pacific
: The central north Pacific hurricane season has officially ended. Routine issuance of the tropical weather outlook will resume on June 1, 2015. During the off-season, special tropical weather outlooks will be issued as conditions warrant.


Here’s a link to the Central Pacific Hurricane Center (CPHC)


>>>
Northwest Pacific Ocean:
There are no active tropical cyclones


>>> South Pacific Ocean: There are no active tropical cyclones

>>> North and South Indian Oceans:
Tropical cyclone 05S (Bansi) is now active in the south Indian Ocean. Here’s the JTWC graphical track map for this strengthening tropical storm. Here’s the NOAA satellite image of this system…to the north of La Reunion Island.

Here’s a link to the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC)

 

Interesting: Global Warming “hiatus” connected to volcanic eruptions The “warming hiatus” that has occurred over the last 15 years has been caused in part by small volcanic eruptions.


Scientists have long known that volcanoes cool the atmosphere because of the sulfur dioxide that is expelled during eruptions. Droplets of sulfuric acid that form when the gas combines with oxygen in the upper atmosphere can persist for many months, reflecting sunlight away from Earth and lowering temperatures at the surface and in the lower atmosphere.


Previous research suggested that early 21st-century eruptions might explain up to a third of the recent warming hiatus.


New research available online in the journal Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) further identifies observational climate signals caused by recent volcanic activity. This new research complements an earlier GRL paper published in November, which relied on a combination of ground, air and satellite measurements, indicating that a series of small 21st-century volcanic eruptions deflected substantially more solar radiation than previously estimated.


“This new work shows that the climate signals of late 20th- and early 21st-century volcanic activity can be detected in a variety of different observational data sets,” said Benjamin Santer, a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientist and lead author of the study.


The warmest year on record is 1998. After that, the steep climb in global surface temperatures observed over the 20th century appeared to level off. This “hiatus” received considerable attention, despite the fact that the full observational surface temperature record shows many instances of slowing and acceleration in warming rates. Scientists had previously suggested that factors such as weak solar activity and increased heat uptake by the oceans could be responsible for the recent lull in temperature increases. After publication of a 2011 paper in the journal Science by Susan Solomon of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (link is external) (MIT), it was recognized that an uptick in volcanic activity might also be implicated in the warming hiatus.


Prior to the 2011 Science paper, the prevailing scientific thinking was that only very large eruptions — on the scale of the cataclysmic 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines, which ejected an estimated 20 million metric tons (44 billion pounds) of sulfur — were capable of impacting global climate. This conventional wisdom was largely based on climate model simulations. But according to David Ridley, an atmospheric scientist at MIT and lead author of the November GRL paper, these simulations were missing an important component of volcanic activity.


Ridley and colleagues found the missing piece of the puzzle at the intersection of two atmospheric layers, the stratosphere and the troposphere — the lowest layer of the atmosphere, where all weather takes place. Those layers meet between 10 and 15 kilometers (six to nine miles) above the Earth.


Satellite measurements of the sulfuric acid droplets and aerosols produced by erupting volcanoes are generally restricted to above 15 km. Below 15 km, cirrus clouds can interfere with satellite aerosol measurements. This means that toward the poles, where the lower stratosphere can reach down to 10 km, the satellite measurements miss a significant chunk of the total volcanic aerosol loading.


To get around this problem, the study by Ridley and colleagues combined observations from ground-, air- and space-based instruments to better observe aerosols in the lower portion of the stratosphere. They used these improved estimates of total volcanic aerosols in a simple climate model, and estimated that volcanoes may have caused cooling of 0.05 degrees to 0.12 degrees Celsius since 2000.


The second Livermore-led study shows that the signals of these late 20th and early 21st eruptions can be positively identified in atmospheric temperature, moisture and the reflected solar radiation at the top of the atmosphere. A vital step in detecting these volcanic signals is the removal of the “climate noise” caused by El Niños and La Niñas.


“The fact that these volcanic signatures are apparent in multiple independently measured climate variables really supports the idea that they are influencing climate in spite of their moderate size,” said Mark Zelinka, another Livermore author. “If we wish to accurately simulate recent climate change in models, we cannot neglect the ability of these smaller eruptions to reflect sunlight away from Earth.”