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

78 – 70  Lihue, Kauai
83 – 71  Honolulu, Oahu
79 – 67  Molokai AP
83 – 69  Kahului AP, Maui
84 – 74  Kailua Kona
81 – 68  Hilo AP, Hawaii

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

1.93  Mount Waialeale, Kauai
0.34  Poamoho RG 1, Oahu
1.10  Molokai
0.00  Lanai
0.00  Kahoolawe
0.72  West Wailuaiki, Maui
2.46  Saddle Quarry, Big Island

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

28  Port Allen, Kauai – NE
32  Oahu Forest NWR, Oahu – S
29  Molokai – NNE
30  Lanai – NE
35  Kahoolawe – NE
29  Kahului AP, Maui – NNE 
30  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

http://weather.unisys.com/satellite/sat_ir_enh_west_loop-12.gif
Low pressure systems over the ocean far to the northwest
through northeast…along with their trailing cold fronts

http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/goes/west/cpac/ir4.jpg
Clear to partly cloudy, a few cloudy areas…high cirrus clouds
southeast through southwest, and considerable thunderstorms
far south and southwest

 

http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/goes/west/hi/ir4.jpg
Partly cloudy windward, clear to partly cloudy
leeward areas…thin cirrus south of the Big Island

 

http://radar.weather.gov/Conus/RadarImg/hawaii.gif
Just a few showers…mostly windward and over the nearby ocean
Looping radar image 

Small Craft Advisory…coasts and channels
around Maui County and the Big Island

 

~~~ Hawaii Weather Narrative ~~~



Trades winds continuing…into next week. Here’s the latest weather map, showing the Hawaiian Islands, and the rest of the North Pacific Ocean. We find a high pressure systems not far offshore to the west-northwest and northeast…with their associated ridge extending to the north of the state. At the same time, we see a gale low pressure systems north and northwest along with their trailing cold fronts. Moderately strong trade winds will continue well into the future, with minor fluctuations in strength along the way. A cold front moving by to the north of the state during the Friday-Saturday time frame…may cause our trade wind flow to weaken modestly. The extended forecast calls for moderately strong trade winds prevailing well into next week.

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

Here’s the Hawaiian Islands Sulfate Aerosol animated graphic – showing vog forecast

Trade wind weather pattern holding firm…well into the future. The trade winds will keep most showers focused along the windward sides. A relatively dry trade wind weather pattern will prevail, with most showers arriving during the night and early morning hours. As a cold front moves by to the north of the islands during the weekend, we may see some modest increase in localized showers then. Otherwise, nothing out of the ordinary expected…with pleasant April weather conditions prevailing.

Marine environment details: A west-northwest swell continues to traverse island coastal waters, and is expected to peak, then gradually lower overnight…into the weekend. A high surf advisory remains posted for north facing shores of most islands, and for west facing shores of Kauai, as resultant surf is expected to peak between 12 and 15 feet. A small south swell is still possible Friday and Saturday. A moderate northwest swell is also possible Tuesday and Wednesday of next week.

A small craft advisory /SCA/ is in effect through tonight for waters most exposed to west-northwest swell and wind waves, where combined seas will peak near 10 feet. Additionally, winds accelerating between Maui and the Big Island have also necessitated a SCA for the Alenuihaha Channel. The SCA for winds may need to be expanded to include other windy areas around Maui County and the Big Island…over the next few days.

 

   https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/10/59/78/10597835ecfc5f820ba110afb9c7dbfe.jpg
April Full Moon


Here on Maui – Well before sunrise on this Wednesday morning, we find partly to mostly cloudy skies along the windward coasts and slopes…stretching up over the West Maui Mountains. These clouds are dropping a few showers, although nothing unusual. Elsewhere around the island, skies were clear, setting the stage for another nice day coming up. Here in upcountry Kula, it’s clear and calm, with an air temperature at my weather tower of 47.4F degrees. At near the same time, the Kahului AP was registering 70 degrees, while it was 68 out in Hana, and 45 atop the Haleakala Crater. / It’s not around 10am, and I’m surprised to see so many clouds in our local skies. I don’t personally mind, it’s just that it’s a bit contrary to what I had forecast earlier this morning.

– Early evening, weather conditions remain very pleasant, which is common this time of year. I see no reason that we’ll move right into another great day Thursday! / Oh my, the full moon is rising…it’s so beautiful tonight!

 

~~~ I recently got a question from a fellow employee of the Pacific Disaster Center, asking me about the upcoming 2016 hurricane season in the Central Pacific. I wrote a few words in response, and thought I’d share them with you:

As for the upcoming 2016 hurricane season in the Central Pacific, quite honestly I’d prefer not to get out ahead of what the NWS Central Pacific Hurricane Center will be announcing a little later this spring.

With that said, I notice that NOAA is saying: “A transition to ENSO-neutral is likely during late Northern Hemisphere spring or early summer 2016, with an increasing chance of La Niña during the second half of the year.”

This is good news, in contrast to the strong El Nino that we pushed through during the 2015 hurricane season.

In simple terms, El Nino-neutral heading towards La Nina conditions, will present tropical cyclones with less favorable environmental conditions…especially in terms of cooler sea surface temperatures.

So, in general terms, I would expect a less active hurricane season this summer (compared to last year) into the fall season as well.

As you may remember, on January 7th, 2016 Hurricane Pali formed here in the Central Pacific, becoming the earliest Central Pacific tropical cyclone to form on record. Therefore, we’ve already had one tropical cyclone this year, although it was very much a part of the very strong El Nino of last year…into the first part of this year.

As you know, the hurricane season will officially start on May 15th in the East Pacific Ocean, and on June 1st here in the Central Pacific…they will both end on November 30th.

These dates conventionally delimit the period of each year when most tropical cyclones form in the Pacific basin. However, as illustrated by Hurricane Pali…the formation of tropical cyclones is possible at any time of the year…especially when we have strong El Nino conditions present.

By the way, this marked the earliest formation of a tropical cyclone on record in the Central Pacific, surpassing 1989’s Tropical Storm Winona by six days.

 

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 the 2015 hurricane season summary

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 the 2015 hurricane season summary

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 the 2015 hurricane season summary

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

>>> Northwest Pacific Ocean: No active tropical cyclones

>>> South Pacific Ocean:

Tropical Cyclone 20P (Amos) remains active, heading more or less towards American Samoa, in the South Pacific Ocean…here’s the JTWC graphical track map, a satellite image, and what the computer forecast models are showing


>>> North and South Indian Oceans / Arabian Sea:

Tropical Cyclone 19S (Fantala) remains active near Madagascar in the South Indian Ocean…here’s the JTWC graphical track map, a satellite image, and what the computer forecast models are showing

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


Interesting: Ocean currents push phytoplankton and pollution…faster than thought – The billions of single-celled marine organisms known as phytoplankton can drift from one region of the world’s oceans to almost any other place on the globe in less than a decade, Princeton University researchers have found.

Unfortunately, the same principle can apply to plastic debris, radioactive particles and virtually any other man-made flotsam and jetsam that litter our seas, the researchers found. Pollution can thus become a problem far from where it originated within just a few years.

The finding that objects can move around the globe in just 10 years suggests that ocean biodiversity may be more resilient to climate change than previously thought, according to a study published this week in the journal Nature Communications. Phytoplankton form the basis of the marine food chain, and their rapid spread could enable them to quickly repopulate areas where warming seas or ocean acidification have decimated them.

“Our study shows that the ocean is quite efficient in moving things around,” said Bror Fredrik Jönsson, an associate research scholar in Princeton’s Department of Geosciences, who conducted the study with co-author James R. Watson, a former Princeton postdoctoral researcher who is now a researcher at Stockholm University.

“This comes as a surprise to a lot of people, and in fact we spent about two years confirming this work to make sure we got it right,” Jönsson said.

One of the strengths of the model is its approach of following phytoplankton wherever they go throughout the world rather than focusing on their behavior in one region, Jönsson said. Because most marine organisms are mobile, this particle-tracking approach can yield new insights compared to the approach of studying one area of ocean.

The resulting model works for objects that have no ability to control their movement such as phytoplankton, bacteria and man-made debris. Organisms that can control their movement even a small amount — such as zooplankton, which can control their vertical position in water — are not accounted for in the model. Nor does the model apply to objects such as boats that protrude above the water and can be pushed by surface winds.

The team applied a computer algorithm to calculate the fastest route an object can travel via ocean currents between various points on the globe. Most previous studies looked only at movement of phytoplankton within regions. The resulting database, Jönsson said, is analogous to a mileage chart one would find on a road map or atlas showing the distance between two cities, except that Jönsson and Watson are indicating the speed of travel between different points.

The researchers confirmed that the travel times calculated by their model were similar to the time it took real objects accidentally dumped into the ocean to be carried by currents. For instance, 29,000 rubber ducks and other plastic bath toys toppled off a Chinese freighter in 1992 and have since been tracked as a method of understanding ocean currents. A similar utility has stemmed from the “Great Shoe Spill of 1990” when more than 60,000 Nike athletic shoes plunged into the ocean near Alaska and have been riding the currents off the Pacific Northwest ever since.

The researchers’ model also matched the amount of time it took radioactive particles to reach the West Coast of the United States from Japan’s Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant, which released large amounts of radioactive materials into the Pacific Ocean following heavy damage from a tsunami in March 2011. The actual travel time of the materials was 3.6 years; the model calculated it would take 3.5 years.

To create the model, Jönsson and Watson obtained surface-current data from a database of modeled global surface currents developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and housed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Into this virtual world they released thousands of particles that represented phytoplankton and then ran simulations multiple times, comparing past and present runs for accuracy and making tweaks to improve the model. They eventually tracked more than 50 billion positions of particles, which is just a fraction of the actual number of phytoplankton in the ocean.

Because phytoplankton mainly reproduce asexually — meaning that one organism alone can produce offspring — only one individual needs to reach a new area to colonize it. This fact led the team to look at the shortest time it takes to get around the world rather than the average time. “The rule for our phytoplankton was ‘drive at fast as possible,'” Jönsson said.

To cut down the computing resources needed to track the particles, the researchers calculated the fastest way to get from one place to another using a shortcut commonly employed by smartphone apps and in-car navigation systems. The method, called “Dijkstra’s algorithm” after the late Dutch computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra who developed it in the 1950s, calculates how to get from A to C if you know the route from A to B and B to C.

“Dijkstra’s algorithm is a way of optimizing for the shortest path between two positions when you have a network of possible locations, and we used it to find pathways when there was no direct link from one region to another,” Watson said.

Although each step in the pathway from one region to another may be unlikely, the fact that a single phytoplankton organism, which lives only a few weeks, can give rise to millions of offspring means that even unlikely paths will have some followers.

Professor of Marine Sciences Per Jonsson at the University of Gothenburg Center for Sea and Society in Sweden said that the analysis offers a new perspective on global connectivity. “This is the first attempt to identify time scales of connectivity and possible dispersal barriers for plankton across all oceans,” said Jonsson, who had no role in the research and is not related to study author Bror Jönsson. “The general message is that all parts of the ocean surface are connected on surprisingly short time scales.

“This implies that regional declines in plankton fitness due to climate change may be buffered by relatively rapid immigration coupled with community sorting or evolutionary change,” Jonsson continued. “The authors also offer a practical and predictive tool for a range of studies regarding global ocean dispersal, including the spread of contaminants and marine litter.”

The paper, “The timescales of global surface-ocean connectivity,” was published online in-advance-of-print April 19 in the journal Nature Communications. The work was funded in part by the National Science Foundation, NASA and the Nippon Foundation-University of British Columbia’s Nereus Program.