Hawaiian Islands Weather details & Aloha Paragraphs / March 30-31, 2015

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

81 – 72  Lihue, Kauai
80 – 68  Honolulu, Oahu
84 – 65  Kahului, Maui
85 – 71  Kailua Kona
82 – 66  Hilo, Hawaii

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

2.50  Mount Waialeale
0.66  Oahu Forest NWR, Oahu
0.50  Puu Alii, Molokai
0.00  Lanai
0.00  Kahoolawe
2.48  Puu Kukui, Maui
1.13  Kawainui Stream, Big Island

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

22  Waimea Heights, Kauai – NE
27  Waianae Valley – E
27  Molokai – SE
27  Lanai – NE
32  Kahoolawe – NE
31  Kapalua, Maui – NE
27  Kealakomo, Big Island – NE

Hawaii’s Mountains – Here’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



Lots of gale low pressure systems, moving by
from the west to the east…north of Hawaii


Partly to mostly cloudy with some clear to partly cloudy conditions…
with showery clouds riding in on the trade winds

Showers falling over the nearby ocean…stretching over
the islands locally

Here’s the looping radar image for the
Hawaiian Islands

~~~ Hawaii Weather Narrative ~~~

The Mauna Kea Summit…on the Big Island of Hawaii

Flood Advisory…parts of Kauai until 745am –
parts of Oahu until 7am

The trade winds will falter Tuesday, before increasing again Wednesday…then slowing down again Friday into the weekend. 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 high pressure systems to the northeast and northwest…with associated ridges of high pressure. At the same time, we have a low pressure system far to the northeast of the islands, with the tail-end of a dissipating cold front offshore to the northeast of the islands. The trade winds will be faltering again Tuesday into Wednesday, coming back Thursday…into the weekend.

The trade winds will bring off and on windward showers…drier along our leeward beaches. We’ll see quite a few showers falling along our windward sides into the night…with a few stretching over into the leeward sides locally. The forecast suggests that an area of showers will move over the state Tuesday, leading to a few briefly heavy afternoon showers around the mountains into Wednesday. As the trade winds pick up again Thursday onwards, we’ll see more windward biased showers arriving into the weekend. I’ll be back with more updates on all of the above, I hope you have a great Monday night wherever you’re spending it! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Here on Maui:  The skies are mostly clear to partly cloudy with cloudy areas over the windward sides of Maui early this Monday morning…along with a few showers here and there. The low temperature was 52 degrees here at my Kula weather tower at 545am, while it was 71 degrees down at the Kahului airport, and 45 degrees atop the Haleakala Crater at the same time. The warmest low temperature around the state was 74 degrees at Lihue, Kauai.

~~~ We’re into the early afternoon hours at 150pm, under cloudy skies, with a light mist beginning to fall up here in Kula. Looking around from my weather deck, there are lots of clouds around Maui this afternoon, although with some spotty sunshine over towards the south and west shores, and the central valley.

~~~ It’s now 545pm in the early evening hours, under partly to mostly cloudy skies, although with some cloud free spots here on Maui in places. Here in upcountry Kula, it’s cloudy with an air temperature of 67 degrees…with a few light sprinkles falling.

~~~ Here’s a weather product that I produced for the Pacific Disaster Center (PDC) this morning

>>> 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:  Super Typhoon 04W (Maysak) remains active in the northwest Pacific, here’s the JTWC graphical track map, along with a satellite image…and what the computer weather models are showing.

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

>>> North and South Indian Oceans: There are no active tropical cyclones

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

Interesting: Climate change does not cause extreme winters, experts say – Cold snaps like the ones that hit the eastern United States in the past winters are not a consequence of climate change. Scientists at ETH Zurich and the California Institute of Technology have shown that global warming actually tends to reduce temperature variability.

Cold snaps like the ones that hit the eastern United States in the past winters are not a consequence of climate change. Scientists at ETH Zurich and the California Institute of Technology have shown that global warming actually tends to reduce temperature variability.

Repeated cold snaps led to temperatures far below freezing across the eastern United States in the past two winters. Parts of the Niagara Falls froze, and ice floes formed on Lake Michigan. Such low temperatures had become rare in recent years. Pictures of icy, snow-covered cities made their way around the world, raising the question of whether climate change could be responsible for these extreme events.

It has been argued that the amplified warming of the Arctic relative to lower latitudes in recent decades has weakened the polar jet stream, a strong wind current several kilometres high in the atmosphere driven by temperature differences between the warm tropics and cold polar regions. One hypothesis is that a weaker jet stream may become more wavy, leading to greater fluctuations in temperature in mid-latitudes. Through a wavier jet stream, it has been suggested, amplified Arctic warming may have contributed to the cold snaps that hit the eastern United States.

Temperature range will decrease

Scientists at ETH Zurich and at the California Institute of Technology, led by Tapio Schneider, professor of climate dynamics at ETH Zurich, have come to a different conclusion. They used climate simulations and theoretical arguments to show that in most places, the range of temperature fluctuations will decrease as the climate warms. So not only will cold snaps become rarer simply because the climate is warming. Additionally, their frequency will be reduced because fluctuations about the warming mean temperature also become smaller, the scientists wrote in the latest issue of the Journal of Climate.

The study’s point of departure was that higher latitudes are indeed warming faster than lower ones, which means that the temperature difference between the equator and the poles is decreasing. Imagine for a moment that this temperature difference no longer exists. This would mean that air masses would have the same temperature, regardless of whether they flow from the south or north. In theory there would no longer be any temperature variability. Such an extreme scenario will not occur, but it illustrates the scientists’ theoretical approach.

Extremes will become rarer

Using a highly simplified climate model, they examined various climate scenarios to verify their theory. It showed that the temperature variability in mid-latitudes indeed decreases as the temperature difference between the poles and the equator diminishes. Climate model simulations by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) showed similar results: as the climate warms, temperature differences in mid-latitudes decrease, and so does temperature variability, especially in winter.

Temperature extremes will therefore become rarer as this variability is reduced. But this does not mean there will be no temperature extremes in the future. “Despite lower temperature variance, there will be more extreme warm periods in the future because the Earth is warming,” says Schneider. The researchers limited their work to temperature trends. Other extreme events, such as storms with heavy rain or snowfall, can still become more common as the climate warms, as other studies have shown.

North-south shift makes the difference

And the jet stream? Schneider shrugs off the idea: “The waviness of the jet stream that makes our day-to-day weather does not change much.” Changes in the north-south difference in temperatures play a greater role in modifying temperature variability.

Schneider wants to explore the implications these results have in further studies. In particular, he wants to pursue the question of whether heatwaves in Europe may become more common because the frequency of blocking highs may increase. And he wants to find why these high pressure systems become stationary and how they change with the climate.