Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs

The trade winds will prevail through the next week at least…increasing in strength some Friday into the weekend.  Weather maps show a 1031 millibar high pressure system far to the northeast of Hawaii Thursday evening. This high will provide moderately strong trade winds across our tropical latitudes through Friday. Those typically windiest areas will see somewhat stronger and gusty conditions, especially during the afternoon hours. The winds are already a little stronger now, which has necessitated small craft wind advisory flags to go up in the channels between Molokai and Maui, and between Maui and the Big Island…and the waters along the leeward side of the Big Island.
 
Rather dry weather will continue, with most of whatever few showers that fall…occurring along the windward sides of the islands. The night and early morning hours will have the greatest likelihood of these few occasional showers. The leeward sides will remain quite sunny and dry during the days. The Kona coast and slopes of the Big Island, may see some late afternoon, or early evening showers falling locally. There are no organized rain areas taking aim on our islands, no cold fronts either. These favorably inclined weather circumstances are expected to continue through the first few days of next week.

It’s Thursday evening as I begin updating this last paragraph of today’s narrative. A fairly typical trade wind weather pattern is well established here in the Hawaiian Islands now. Looking at this looping satellite image, we can see that there are lots of cirrus clouds in the deeper tropics to our south and southwest. A large batch of these cirrus clouds moved through the state earlier in the day, but had mostly cleared the state by the early evening hours. It appears that there are more heading our way however, and will likely be around through the next couple of days at least. High cirrus clouds are famous for providing gorgeous sunrise and sunset colors. ~~~ As I was mentioning in yesterday’s narrative, I see no reason to think that Friday will be much different than Thursday, at least in terms of the relatively dry conditions, as well as the trade wind flow over the state at low levels of the atmosphere. Higher up, in the upper realms, we’ll probably see another intrusion of high level cirrus clouds. ~~~ I’ll be back very early Friday morning with your next new weather narrative from paradise. I hope you have a great Thursday night wherever you happen to be spending it!Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting3: The basic ingredients for life — warmth, water and organic chemicals — are in place on Saturn’s small moon Enceladus, scientists said on Wednesday in detailing the content of huge plumes erupting off its surface.  The scientists described observations made by the Cassini spacecraft when it flew over the surface of Enceladus on March 12 as part of an ongoing exploration of Saturn and its moons.  Scientists working on the joint U.S.-European mission did not say they had detected any actual evidence of life on this moon where geysers at itssouth pole continuously shoot watery plumes some 500 miles off its icy surface into space.  But they said the building blocks for life were there, and described the plumes as a surprising organic brew sort of like carbonated water with an essence of natural gas.