Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs

Interesting: Whale watchers counted a record number of humpback whales off Maui this weekend. Volunteers at the annual count organized by the Pacific Whale Foundation tally whale sightings and record whale behaviors from 12 shoreline observation stations. Saturday’s count of 1,726 humpback whale sightings broke the 2006 record of 1,265.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration organizes counts on other islands. More than 700 volunteers from around the state took part at 57 sites. Flat seas, a mild breeze and clear skies helped whale watchers do their job on Kauai. Crater Hill had the most sightings of any of the 15 Kauai observation stations. A dozen whales were spotted there during a 15-minute reporting period between 8 a.m. and noon.

Interesting2: The West has become 500 percent dustier in the past two centuries due to westward U.S. expansion and accompanying human activity beginning in the 1800s, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder.  Sediment records from dust blown into alpine lakes in southwest Colorado‘s San Juan Mountains over millennia indicates the sharp rise in dust deposits coincided with railroad, ranching and livestock activity in the middle of the last century, said geological sciences Assistant Professor Jason Neff, lead author on the study. The results have implications ranging from ecosystem alteration to human health, he said. 

"From about 1860 to 1900, the dust deposition rates shot up so high that we initially thought there was a mistake in our data," said Neff. "But the evidence clearly shows the western U.S. had it’s own Dust Bowl beginning in the 1800s when the railroads went in and cattle and sheep were introduced into the rangelands."   A paper on the research funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation was published in the Feb. 24 issue of Nature Geoscience. Co-authors included CU-Boulder’s Ashley Ballantyne, Lang Farmer and Corey Lawrence, Cornell University‘s Natalie Mahowald, the University of Arizona‘s Jessica Conroy and Jonathan Overpeck, Christopher Landry of the Center of Snow and Avalanche Studies in Silverton, Colo., the University of Utah‘s Tom Painter and the U.S. Geological Survey’s Richard Reynolds.

Interesting3: A new coating for solar panels could lead to more efficient solar collection.  The energy from sunlight falling on only 9 percent of California’s Mojave Desert could power all of the United States’ electricity needs if the energy could be efficiently harvested, according to some estimates. Unfortunately, current-generation solar cell technologies are too expensive and inefficient for wide-scale commercial applications.  A team of Northwestern University researchers has developed a new anode coating strategy that significantly enhances the efficiency of solar energy power conversion.