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

81 – 66  Lihue, Kauai
85 – 68  Honolulu, Oahu
81 – 62  Molokai
83 – 63  Kahului AP, Maui
83 – 64  Hilo, Hawaii

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

0.09  Puu Lua, Kauai
0.54  Manoa Lyon Arboretum, Oahu
0.01  Kaunakakai Mauka, Molokai
0.01  Lanai
0.00  Kahoolawe
0.09  Hana AP, Maui
0.11  Glenwood, Big Island

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

25  Port Allen, Kauai – NW
22  Waianae Harbor, Oahu – NW
14  Molokai – NNE
18  Lanai – NW
16  Kahoolawe – NW
09  Hana , Maui – NW
20  Kohala Ranch, Big Island – W

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

http://weather.unisys.com/satellite/sat_ir_enh_west_loop-12.gif
We see a couple of minor cold fronts to our northwest

Here’s a wind profile…of the offshore waters
around the islands – with a closer view

http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/goes/west/cpac/vis.jpg
High clouds offshore southwest through south…
along with a weak cold approaching Kauai

http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/goes/west/hi/vis.jpg
Clear to partly cloudy…which are pre-frontal cloud bands


http://radar.weather.gov/Conus/RadarImg/hawaii.gif
Just a few showers falling locally – looping radar image


~~~ Hawaii Weather Narrative ~~~



Our local winds are picking up some now, generally from the northwest for the time being…then trade winds again Wednesday. Here’s the latest weather map, showing the Hawaiian Islands, and the rest of the North Pacific Ocean. We find a near 1025 millibar high pressure system far to our northeast. At the same time, we find several storm and gale low pressure systems far to our north. The winds will continue, although come out of the unusual northwesterly direction…before turning north to northeast Wednesday. As we get into later Thursday and Friday, our winds will again lighten up. It appears that we’ll see chilly north to northeasterly winds arriving New Year’s Day into the weekend…behind another cold front. Generally light winds will prevail during the first half of next week.

A few showers locally…associated with a fragmenting and weak cold front. The northwest and north sides of the islands will see just a few passing showers. Windward clouds and a few showers falling, as light to moderately strong trade winds return mid-week into Thursday. Lighter winds will return again Friday ahead of the next cold front, arriving over Kauai and Oahu Friday, and pushing across Maui County and the Big Island that night. This front won’t be a big deal in terms of rainfall, having limited moisture…and very little upper level support to work with. It looks like dry to very dry weather will prevail for several days after this upcoming holiday weekend.

Here in Maui County…It’s mostly clear across the island this morning before sunrise…and still too dark for me to see if there’s any volcanic haze over us. Here in upcountry Kula, it’s calm and clear…with an air temperature of 51.8F degrees at 550am. The temperature in contrast was 63 degrees down near sea level in Kahului, with 73 out in Hana, 64 at Maalaea Bay…and 41 atop the Haleakala Crater at the same time. Meanwhile, Kahoolawe’s highest elevation was 66 degrees, and the same reading at Lanai City. / Now at 635am, it’s just light enough to see that in fact…that there is some volcanic haze (vog) in our skies.

– Afternoon update, now at 415pm Tuesday afternoon, the skies are still filled with lots of clouds…not to mention volcanic haze. Although, just now I’m beginning to feel northwesterly winds blowing in the window of my Kula weather tower. This should gradually help to scour out these volcanic emissions from the Big Island vents. We will likely see improved visibility as we move through the day Wednesday. 

– We’ve pushed into the early evening hours now, with still lots of low clouds, and a cool northwest breeze. Radar images don’t show many showers, although it looks like a few might be moving across the island here and there just before sunset. Looking again, it could just be the volcanic haze, giving the atmosphere a look of light showers falling. The air temperature at just before 6pm was 63.6 degrees here in Kula, while it was a warmer 78 down at the Kahului airport…with a cool 48 reading atop the Haleakala Crater at the same time.

I’ll be back with many more updates on all of the above and below, I hope you have a great Tuesday night wherever you’re spending it! Aloha for now…Glenn


World-wide tropical cyclone activity:

>>> Atlantic Ocean: The last regularly scheduled Tropical Weather Outlook of the 2015 Atlantic hurricane season…has occurred. Routine issuance of the Tropical Weather Outlook will resume on June 1, 2016. During the off-season, Special Tropical Weather Outlooks will be issued if conditions warrant.

Here’s a satellite image of the Atlantic Ocean

>>> Caribbean Sea: The last regularly scheduled Tropical Weather Outlook of the 2015 Atlantic hurricane season…has occurred. Routine issuance of the Tropical Weather Outlook will resume on June 1, 2016. During the off-season, Special Tropical Weather Outlooks will be issued if conditions warrant.

>>> Gulf of Mexico: The last regularly scheduled Tropical Weather Outlook of the 2015 Atlantic hurricane season…has occurred. Routine issuance of the Tropical Weather Outlook will resume on June 1, 2016. During the off-season, Special Tropical Weather Outlooks will be issued if conditions warrant.

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

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

>>> Eastern Pacific: The last regularly scheduled Tropical Weather Outlook of the 2015 North Pacific hurricane season…has occurred. Routine issuance of the Tropical Weather Outlook will resume on May 15, 2016. During the off-season, Special Tropical Weather Outlooks will be issued if 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, 2016. During the off-season, special tropical weather outlooks will be issued if 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 / Arabian Sea: There are no active tropical cyclones

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


Interesting:  The economic benefits of mercury reductions – Mercury pollution is a global problem with local consequences: Emissions from coal-fired power plants and other sources travel around the world through the atmosphere, eventually settling in oceans and waterways, where the pollutant gradually accumulates in fish. Consumption of mercury-contaminated seafood leads to increased risk for cardiovascular disease and cognitive impairments.

In the past several years, a global treaty and a domestic policy have been put in place to curb mercury emissions. But how will such policies directly benefit the U.S.? 

In a new study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, MIT researchers report that global action on reducing mercury emissions will lead to twice the economic benefits for the U.S., compared with domestic action, by 2050. However, those in the U.S. who consume locally caught freshwater fish, rather than seafood from the global market, will benefit more from domestic rather than international mercury regulations.

The researchers calculated the projected U.S. economic benefits from the Minamata Convention on Mercury, a global treaty adopted in 2013 to reduce mercury emissions worldwide, compared with the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS), a national regulation set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to reduce mercury pollution from the country’s coal-fired power plants.

Overall, while both policies are projected to lead to roughly the same amount of reductions in mercury deposited on U.S. soil compared to a no-policy case, Americans’ consumption of mercury by 2050 are estimated to be 91 percent lower under the global treaty, compared to 32 percent under U.S. policy alone. The researchers say these numbers reflect the U.S. commercial fish market, 90 percent of which is sourced from Pacific and Atlantic Ocean basins — regions that are heavily influenced by emissions from non-U.S. sources, including China.

From their projections of reduced mercury consumption, the researchers estimated health impacts to the U.S. population under both policies, then translated these impacts into economic benefits. They characterized these in two ways: projected lifetime benefits from an individual’s reduced exposure to mercury, including willingness to pay for lowering the risk of a fatal heart attack, cost savings from avoided medical care, and increased earnings; and economy-wide benefits, or the associated productivity gains of a national labor force with improved IQ and fewer heart attacks, as a result of reduced exposure to mercury.

Based on these calculations, the team estimated that by 2050, emissions reductions under the Minamata Convention on Mercury would lead to $339 billion in lifetime benefits and $104 billion in economy-wide benefits in the U.S., compared to $147 billion and $43 billion, respectively, from MATS. The global treaty, then, should lead to more than twice the benefits projected from the domestic policy.

“Historically it’s been hard to quantify benefits for global treaties,” says Noelle Selin, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Career Development Associate Professor in MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems and Society and in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences. “Would we be able to see a U.S. benefit, given you’re spreading reductions and benefits around the world? And we were.”

Tracing the policy-to-impacts pathway

Determining how regulatory policies will ultimately lead to health and economic benefits is a complex and convoluted problem. To trace the pathway from policy to impacts, Selin and co-author Amanda Giang, a graduate student in MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, began with estimates of mercury reductions set by both the Minamata Convention and MATS.

The team then used an atmospheric transport model to trace where emissions would settle over time, based on the reductions proposed by each policy scenario. From regional depositions of mercury, they then estimated the resulting mercury concentrations in fish and mapped these concentrations to seafood sources throughout the world.

Next, the team correlated seafood sources to fish consumption in the U.S., and calculated changes in human exposure to mercury through time. They used epidemiological models to estimate how changes in mercury exposure affect incidence of health impacts, such as heart attacks and IQ deficits. From there, Selin and Giang used economic valuation methods to translate heath impacts into economic benefits — namely, lifetime and economy-wide benefits to the U.S.

Understanding the drivers

While the researchers were able to come up with benefits in the billions for both the global and domestic policies, they acknowledge that these numbers come with a significant amount of uncertainty, which they also explored.

“We’re trying to understand different drivers in the variability of these numbers,” Giang says. “There’s a lot of uncertainty in this system, and we want to understand what shifts these numbers up and down.”

For example, scientists are unsure how far different forms of mercury will travel through the atmosphere, as well as how long it will take for mercury to accumulate in fish. In their analysis, Giang found that, even taking into account most of these uncertainties, the economic benefits from the global treaty outweighed those from the domestic policy, except when it came to one key uncertainty: where people’s seafood originates.

“We do find that in our scenario where everyone is eating local fish, the benefits of domestic policy are going to be larger than the Minamata convention,” Giang says. “Our study points to the importance of domestic policy in terms of protecting vulnerable populations such as subsistence fishers or other communities that do rely on U.S. freshwater fish.”

“There are a ton of uncertainties here, but we know that mercury is a dangerous pollutant,” Selin adds. “When you put in a policy, how do you think about its ultimate environmental and human effects? We think this method is really a way to try and move that forward.”

This research was funded, in part, by the National Science Foundation.