Hawaiian Islands Weather details & Aloha Paragraphs / May 26-27, 2015

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

81 – 62  Lihue, Kauai
84 – 71  Honolulu, Oahu
80 – 61  Molokai AP
82 – 61  Kahului, Maui
83 – 74  Kailua Kona
76 – 68  Hilo, Hawaii

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

0.06  Kilohana, Kauai
0.34  Punaluu Stream, Oahu
0.16  Kamalo, Molokai
0.01  Lanai
0.00  Kahoolawe
0.06  Kahakuloa, Maui
0.32  Saddle Quarry, Big Island

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

28  Mana, Kauai – NNW
23  Kuaokala, Oahu – NE
12  Molokai – E
18  Lanai – NE
24  Kahoolawe – ESE
21  Kapalua, Maui – SW
17  Upolu AP, 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

We see an unusual low pressure system to the northeast…
with an area of high cirrus approaching from the
southwest of the islands

Clouds still hung-up around the Big Island and parts of Maui County…
with patches of clouds elsewhere – looping version of this image

Showers are falling over the nearby ocean…spreading
over the islands locally – especially southeast of
the Big Island

Here’s the looping radar image for the Hawaiian Islands

~~~ Hawaii Weather Narrative ~~~

Cool, generally north-northeast to northeasterly breezes…then light northeast to easterly breezes 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 located far to the northwest, north and northeast of the state, along with a low pressure system to the northeast. There are the tail-ends of several late season cold fronts to the northeast and further east of the Big Island. The forecast has our current slightly cool wind flow giving way to lighter breezes with localized daytime sea breezes…and overnight down slope land breezes Wednesday through Friday. As we push into the weekend, we may see the return of light trade winds into early next week. 

We’ll see a few afternoon showers over the mountains during second half of this week. Relatively dry and stable air is over the state now, although this seems to be changing now. As we move through the rest of this week, with gradually lighter winds on tap, we’ll shift into a convective weather pattern. This will manifest as cooler than normal clear mornings, with afternoon clouds and showers over the interior upcountry areas, some may become quite generous in some locations. The beaches around the state should remain in better shape, with pleasant conditions in general. I’ll be back with more updates on all of the above, I hope you have a great Tuesday night wherever you’re spending it! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Here on Maui...early Tuesday morning before sunrise, skies are clear to partly cloudy. The air temperature here in Kula at 520am was an unusually cool 49.5 degrees, 63 at the Kahului AP. I fly to Honolulu this morning, as the Pacific Disaster Center is sending me over to attend a meeting at the National Weather Service office…which is on the campus of the University of Hawaii. This meeting will be about the outlook for the upcoming 2015 Central Pacific hurricane season.

– It’s now early evening, under cloudy skies, and a cool northerly breeze. The air temperature is 62.8 degrees at 620pm, although with the wind chill, it feels more like 61. While I was in Honolulu today, at the NWS forecast office, on the campus of the University of Hawaii, I was very surprised to receive an award. I’ll have more to say about that tomorrow, for the moment, I’m a little (ok more than a little) shocked/delighted to be honored in this way! By the way, if you haven’t heard, there are expected to be considerably more than the normal amount of tropical cyclones forming, or coming into the central Pacific during this upcoming hurricane season.

>>> 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: There are no active tropical cyclones

TROPICAL WEATHER OUTLOOK
NWS NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL

For the eastern North Pacific…east of 140 degrees west longitude:

 

1.) Showers and thunderstorms in association with a broad area of
low pressure located several hundred miles south-southwest of the
coast of Mexico have become better organized.  Environmental
conditions appear conducive for development of this system and a
tropical depression is likely to form in the next couple of days as
the system moves slowly west-northwestward to northwestward.

Here's a looping satellite image of this system - and what the

hurricane models are showing for what's being called Invest 92E

* Formation chance through 48 hours...medium...60 percent
* Formation chance through 5 days...high...90 percent

2.) A nearly stationary area of low pressure located about 1500 miles
west-southwest of the southern tip of Baja California continues to
produce a small area of showers and thunderstorms to the east
of the center.  Environmental conditions are expected to become less
favorable over the next day or so, and significant development of
this system is not expected.

Here's a looping satellite image of this area - and what the

hurricane models are showing for what's being called Invest 91E

* Formation chance through 48 hours...low...10 percent 
* Formation chance through 5 days...low...10 percent

This NHC image shows these two disturbances described above – along with the 5-day outlook

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: There are no active tropical cyclones

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

Interesting: Stable Antarctic glaciers are now melting – A dramatic shift has taken place in the glaciers of the southern Antarctic peninsula, writes Bert Wouters. Six years ago these previously stable bodies suddenly stated shedding 60 cubic kilometres of ice per year into the ocean. A stark warning of further surprises to come?

The study, by researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the City University of New York (CUNY), highlights the importance of considering societal changes when trying to determine future climate impacts.

“Both population change and climate change matter,” said NCAR scientist Brian O’Neill, one of the study’s co-authors. “If you want to know how heat waves will affect health in the future, you have to consider both.”

Extreme heat kills more people in the United States than any other weather-related event, and scientists generally expect the number of deadly heat waves to increase as the climate warms. The new study, published May 18 in the journal Nature Climate Change, finds that the overall exposure of to these future heat waves would be vastly underestimated if the role of population changes were ignored.

The total number of people exposed to extreme heat is expected to increase the most in cities across the country’s southern reaches, including Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas, Houston, Oklahoma City, Phoenix, Tampa, and San Antonio.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, which is NCAR’s sponsor, and the U.S. Department of Energy.

CLIMATE, POPULATION, AND HOW THEY INTERACT

The fact that so many glaciers in such a large region suddenly started to lose ice came as a surprise. It shows a very fast response of the ice sheet: in just a few years everything changed.

Antarctica’s glaciers have been making headlines during the past year, and not in a good way.

Whether it’s a massive ice shelf facing imminent risk of collapse, glaciers in the West Antarctic past the point of no return, or new threats to East Antarctic ice, it’s all been rather gloomy.

And now I’m afraid there’s more bad news: a new study published in the journal Science, led by a team of my colleagues and I from the University of Bristol, has observed a sudden increase of ice loss in a previously stable part of Antarctica.

The region in question is the southernmost half of the Antarctic Peninsula, a section of the mainland which extends 1,300km into the Southern Ocean.

Its northern half is the continent’s mildest region and the climate effects there are clear. We already knew for instance that the glaciers of the Northern Antarctic Peninsula were in trouble following the disintegration of some of its ice shelves, most famously Larsen A and B.

Further to the west, the massive glaciers feeding into the Amundsen Sea have been shedding ice into the ocean at an alarming rate for decades. Out of the blue, the Southern Peninsula filled up the gap between these two regions and became Antarctica’s second largest contributor to sea level rise.

Using satellite elevation measurements, we found the Southern Antarctic Peninsula showed no signs of change up to 2009. Around that year, multiple glaciers along a vast 750km coastline suddenly started to shed ice into the ocean at a nearly constant rate of 60 cubic km, or about 55 trillion liters of water, each year. That’s enough water to fill 350,000 Empire State Buildings over the past five years.

Some of the glaciers are currently thinning by as much as 4 meters each year. The ice loss in the region is so large that it causes small changes in the Earth’s gravity field, which can be detected by another satellite mission, the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE).

Is this an effect of global warming?

The answer is both yes and no. Data from an Antarctic climate model shows that the sudden change cannot be explained by changes in snowfall or air temperature. Instead, we attribute the rapid ice loss to warming oceans.

Many of the glaciers in the region feed into ice shelves that float on the surface of the ocean. They act as a buttress to the ice resting on bedrock inland, slowing down the flow of the glaciers into the ocean.

The westerly winds that encircle Antarctica have become more vigorous in recent decades, in response to climate warming and ozone depletion. The stronger winds push warm waters from the Southern Ocean poleward, where they eat away at the glaciers and floating ice shelves from below.

Ice shelves in the region have lost almost one-fifth of their thickness in the last two decades, thereby reducing the resisting force on the glaciers.

A key concern is that much of the ice of the Southern Antarctic Peninsula is grounded on bedrock below sea level, which gets deeper inland. This means that even if the glaciers retreat, the warm water will chase them inland and melt them even more.

In just a few years, everything changed. What next?

The region’s melting glaciers are currently adding about 0.16 millimeters to global sea levels per year, which won’t immediately make you run for the hills. But it’s yet another source of sea level rise, about 5% of the global total increase.

What might be a bigger source of concern is that the changes occurred so suddenly and in an area that was behaving quietly until now. The fact that so many glaciers in such a large region suddenly started to lose ice came as a surprise. It shows a very fast response of the ice sheet: in just a few years everything changed.

The Southern Antarctic Peninsula contains enough ice to add 35 cm to sea level, but that won’t happen any time soon. It’s too early to tell how much longer the ice loss will continue and how much it will contribute to future sea level rise.

For this, a detailed knowledge of the geometry of the local ice shelves, the ocean floor topography, ice sheet thickness and glacier flow speeds are crucial.

But the ice on Antarctica is like a sleeping giant. Even if we would stop emitting greenhouse gases as of today, or the inflow of warm water would stop, this inert system would take a long time to find an equilibrium again.