Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures (F) were recorded across the state of Hawaii Tuesday…along with the minimums Tuesday:
80 – 74 Lihue, Kauai
86 – 74 Honolulu, Oahu
83 – 71 Molokai AP
88 – 73 Kahului AP, Maui
86 – 73 Kailua Kona
83 – 69 Hilo AP, Hawaii
Here are the latest 24-hour precipitation totals (inches) for each of the islands…as of Tuesday evening:
0.16 Wainiha, Kauai
0.09 Poamoho RG 1, Oahu
0.01 Puu Alii, Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.00 Kahoolawe
0.12 West Wailuaiki, Maui
0.39 Honaunau, Big Island
The following numbers represent the strongest wind gusts (mph)…as of Tuesday evening:
24 Port Allen, Kauai – NE
35 Oahu Forest NWR, Oahu – SW
29 Molokai – ENE
33 Lanai – NE
36 Kahoolawe – NE
32 Kahului AP, Maui – NNE
30 Pali 2, Big Island – SW
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
Low pressure systems over the ocean far to the north
and northeast…along with their trailing cold fronts
Thunderstorms and high cirrus clouds far
southwest of Hawaii
Mostly clear leeward beaches…partly cloudy some windward areas
A few showers falling locally – Looping radar image
Small Craft Advisory…for the windiest coasts and
channels around Maui County and the Big Island
~~~ Hawaii Weather Narrative ~~~
Trades winds continuing…well into the future. Here’s the latest weather map, showing the Hawaiian Islands, and the rest of the North Pacific Ocean. We find high pressure well offshore to the west-northwest, with another far northeast off the California coast…with an associated ridge extending from its center to the north of the state. At the same time, we see gale low pressure systems far northwest and north, along with a trailing cold front well offshore to the north of the islands. Moderately strong trade winds will continue through the rest of the week, with minor fluctuations in strength and direction…right on 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
The trade winds will keep most showers focused along the windward sides…arriving generally during the night and early morning hours. The leeward sides should remain mostly dry, with a few exceptions here and there at times on the smaller islands. There may be possible afternoon and early evening showers along the leeward slopes above Kona coast as well. Otherwise, there are no unusual weather circumstances expected in our weather for the time being…and likely through the rest of this week. A trade wind weather pattern is well established, with no plans to lose its influence on our area well into the future.
Marine environment details: A small craft advisory /SCA/ has been extended through Thursday for the typically windy waters adjacent to the islands of Maui County and the Big Island. It is possible more zones may be added to the SCA on Wednesday or Thursday, as conditions remain borderline SCA in several other coastal zones. The SCA could be extended into Friday for the windy zones. Trade winds are expected to weaken slightly over the weekend.
Surf is expected to remain below the high surf advisory criteria along all shores through early next week. The current small northwest swell will peak Wednesday, then lower on Thursday. Another small northwest swell arriving Friday will persist through the weekend.
Small southwest and south swell energy will maintain surf along leeward shores this week. A slightly larger south swell is expected early next week. Breezy trade winds will produce choppy conditions along east facing shores.
Here on Maui – Before sunrise on this Tuesday morning, we find partly to mostly cloudy skies along the windward coasts and slopes…stretching up over the West Maui Mountains as usual. These clouds are dropping a few showers, although mostly on the light side of the precipitation spectrum. Elsewhere around the island, skies were mostly clear to partly cloudy. Here in upcountry Kula, it was calm and clear, with an air temperature at my weather tower of 48.9F degrees. At near the same time, the Kahului AP was registering 73 degrees under partly cloudy skies, while it was 75 out in Hana, and 48 atop the Haleakala Crater.
– Early evening, after yet another great spring day…with another on tap again Wednesday!
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)
>>> South Pacific Ocean: No active tropical cyclones
>>> North and South Indian Oceans / Arabian Sea: No active tropical cyclones
Here’s a link to the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC)
Interesting: Chernobyl, three decades on – It was 30 years ago that a meltdown at the V. I. Lenin Nuclear Power Station in the former Soviet Union released radioactive contaminants into the surroundings in northern Ukraine. Airborne contamination from what is now generally termed the Chernobyl disaster spread well beyond the immediate environs of the power plant, and a roughly 1000-square-mile region in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia remains cordoned off, an exclusion zone where human habitation is forbidden.
The radiation spill was a disaster for the environment and its biological inhabitants, but it also created a unique radio-ecological laboratory. University of South Carolina professor of biological sciences Tim Mousseau and longtime collaborator Anders Møller of the CNRS (France) recognized that the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, which comprises areas with a wide range of background radiation levels, was essentially the first place in the world where it would be possible to study the effects of ionizing radiation on animals living in the wild.
Since the atomic bomb was developed during WWII, laboratory testing has been used to assess toxicological effects of ionizing radiation on life, but Mousseau and Møller wanted to examine the effects on free-ranging organisms. In contrast to their laboratory brethren, wild animals have to forage for food and fend for themselves, likely leaving them more vulnerable to new stressors. With that in mind, Mousseau and Møller began studying the natural inhabitants of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in 2000. Their scope expanded after Japan’s Fukushima disaster in 2011, and they have established the USC Chernobyl + Fukushima Initiative, through which they and colleagues have now published more than 90 peer-reviewed papers.
Their work has shown a wide range of damaging effects to wildlife that result from chronic radiation exposure, even when the exposure is at low levels.
“As a starting point for our studies of animal populations, we took our cue from the medical literature—one of the first effects observed was the presence of cataracts in the eyes of people exposed to energy from atomic bombs,” Mousseau says. “And we found that both birds and rodents show elevated frequencies and degree of cataracts in their eyes in the more radioactive areas. Nowadays, we see higher rates of cataracts in flight crews who spend a lot of time in airplanes, which expose them to extra radiation. And people who work in radiology fields are more likely to show increased prevalence and degree of cataract formation in their eyes.”
The team also showed that radiation in Chernobyl diminished brain size, increased incidence of tumor formation, affected fertility and increased the prevalence of developmental abnormalities in birds. And the effects on individuals propagated through groups as well. Populations of barn swallows, for example, which were particularly hard hit in Chernobyl, were lower in areas of higher contamination, and Mousseau thinks they likely would have died off without immigration of new individuals from uncontaminated areas.
“That’s something we tested. Using an isotopic method that shows geographic origin, we compared feathers of barn swallows in the contaminated areas with museum specimens from before the accident and found much more heterogeneity after the accident,” Mousseau says. “Most populations are in some kind of equilibrium, teetering on this balance between the effects of birth and death. If the environment changes for the worse, it pushes them toward extinction, and with all of these negative fitness consequences, that’s what we see: the populations pushed to smaller sizes because the deaths were outweighing the births. But secondarily, in many of these populations what we’re probably seeing is actually a reflection of births, deaths, and immigration. These populations would be locally extinct if it were not for constant immigration.”
And in a recently published paper in Science of the Total Environment, Mousseau and colleagues presented a meta-analysis of oxidative damage resulting from ionizing radiation. Radioactive contamination can have direct effects on, say, chromosomes or DNA, but its energy can also ionize other species in the biological milieu, such as ubiquitous water to form peroxide. The resulting oxidative stress can cause a range of biochemical effects.
“One of the messages coming through our research is that this secondary mechanism through oxidative stress appears to be fairly commonly observed,” Mousseau says. “We have many examples now, both from other people’s research and our own, that shows that there does appear to be some sort of tradeoff between the quantity of antioxidants in the organism’s body and its ability to defend itself against the effects of ionizing radiation.”
The protectiveness of antioxidants in the face of ionizing radiation might part of the explanation for why some populations are less susceptible to radioactive contamination than others, Mousseau adds. “Species that can somehow adjust the use of antioxidants may be using this as a means to reduce genetic damage.”
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