Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs

Magnificent!
Photo Credit: Tim Mckenna

A high pressure ridge remains over the Kauai end of the island chain Wednesday evening, with light winds…gradually becoming light trade winds Thursday. The Hawaiian Islands found light and variable breezes blowing Wednesday, with daytime sea breezes near the beaches. There continues to be a slight drift of air coming up from the southeast direction, which is keeping the volcanic haze in place locally. The trade winds will return briefly Thursday into Friday…then shift back to the southeast, as a cold front moves by north of Aloha state this weekend.

A dry and stable atmosphere will keep precipitation to a bare minimum, with almost everywhere remaining rain free for the time being. Despite the dry atmospherics, there will be afternoon convective cumulus clouds over and around the mountains, although they won’t give more than a few sprinkles at best. Light trade winds will return Thursday, bringing a few passing showers over the windward sides. We’ll find a convective weather pattern taking over this weekend, with modestly increased afternoon showers over the interior sections then, leaving the beaches alone for the most part.

It’s Wednesday evening as I begin updating this last paragraph of today’s narrative. Temperatures rose quickly statewide Wednesday, as the sun climbed higher into the sky. The high temperature rose all the way up to a very warm 86F degrees at Hilo, on the Big Island! This daytime heating caused cumulus cloud to grow around the mountains, aided by the sea breezes that developed locally. Those convective clouds weren’t rainfall producers however, although they looked like they should have cut loose at times. Besides the few showers that may be carried our way by the returning light trade winds Thursday, the next chance for slightly more precipitation will wait until this weekend. The atmosphere will be modestly more shower prone then, as an upper trough of low pressure moves overhead. Those showers will fall primarily over and around the mountains during the afternoon hours, leaving the beaches quite sunny in contrast…at least during the morning hours. ~~~ It appears that the weather here in Hawaii will continue to be just fine, with no major curve balls coming our way for the time being. Wednesday turned out to be a decent day, that is if one could put up with the thick volcanic haze that hung over the Kona area on the Big Island…extending up over the islands of Maui County as well. ~~~ I’ll be back very early Thursday morning with your next new weather narrative from paradise, I hope you have a great Wednesday night until then! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting:  While we continue to fixate on our little local worries, the biggest news story of the year passed unnoticed in the night. The Brazilian government was forced to admit that the destruction of the Amazon rainforest has returned to ecocidal levels. An area the size of Belgium, taking thousands of years to evolve, was destroyed in the past year alone. Some 20 per cent of the forest has now been trashed, with a further 40 per cent set to be slashed in our lifetime. This is steadily happening to all the rainforests on earth. The rainforests with the Amazon by far the largest are the planet’s air conditioner. They suck up millions of tons of greenhouse gases and store them safely out of the atmosphere. But as we hack them down, they are releasing these warming gases. Soon, we will reach a point where there is so much carbon in the atmosphere that the system will pack in and stop extracting anything at all.  We will all feel the heat. It is a stark scientific fact that the last time the world warmed by 6C the upper-end of the UN scientists’ predictions for this century so quickly, almost everything on Earth died. 

Interesting2: Like a finely tuned harp, the whiskers on a rat’s snout pick up particular frequencies and send these teensy signals to the brain. Now scientists have caught the whisker signals on video. With poor eyesight, rats must rely on their whiskers to navigate dark, dismal sewers and other underground haunts. Past research has shown that like harp strings, the shorter whiskers positioned at the front of rats’ snouts are tuned to vibrate at higher frequencies and the longer ones at lower frequencies. These signals get sent to rodents’ brains, where a large portion of their brain cells are devoted to decoding incoming whisker signals, making rats the super-sensors of the slum world. "They can sense the tiniest speck on a wall with their whiskers," said Christopher Moore of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT.

Interesting3: Pesticides, heavy metals and other airborne contaminants are raining down on national parks across the West and Alaska, turning up at sometimes dangerously high levels in lakes, plants and fish.  A sweeping, six-year federal study released Tuesday found evidence of 70 contaminants in 20 national parks and monuments — from Denali in Alaska and Glacier in Montana, to Big Bend in Texas and Yosemite in California.

The findings revealed that some of the Earth’s most pristine wilderness is still within reach of the toxic byproducts of the industrial age.

"Contaminants are everywhere. You can’t get more remote than these northern parts of Alaska and the high Rockies,” said Michael Kent, a fish researcher with Oregon State University who co-authored the study.