Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs

Locally strong and gusty trade winds will continue into Thursday…then gradually mellow out a little Friday into the weekend. A large high pressure center located far to the north of Hawaii, is the source areas of our blustery trade wind flow Wednesday night. Small craft wind advisory flags cover all of Hawaii’s coastal waters, in addition to all the major channels in Hawaii. Those areas protected from the direct trade winds, will have lighter winds as usual. The latest computer forecast guidance suggests that the trade winds will continue to blow right on into next week.
 
The windward sides of the islands will see occasional passing showers. The trade winds are strong enough now that a few stray showers may find their way over into a few leeward areas. It appears that we have slipped back into a fairly normal trade wind weather pattern, at least in terms of precipitation coverage and intensity. The Kona slopes may see a few afternoon showers, which is common when the trades are blowing. Trade wind showers may increase some this weekend along the windward sides.

It’s Wednesday evening as I begin updating this last paragraph of today’s narrative. Winter is just about over, with the spring equinox officially starting at 1:48 a.m. early Thursday morning. This made Wednesday the last full day of winter! Wednesday was more like a spring day than a winter day however, what with all the gusty trade winds blowing across our tropical latitudes of the north central Pacific Ocean. ~~~ A quick glance at this satellite imagery, shows that there’s a considerable amount of high level cirrus clouds coming our way from the west and northwest. They sure do make for great sunrise and sunsets colors when their around…which will be the case over the next few days. ~~~ So then, when you go to bed tonight, it will still be winter, although by the time you get up Thursday morning, bingo, it will be the first day of spring 2008! ~~~ I’ll be back with your next new weather narrative very early Thursday morning, I hope you have a restful Wednesday night until then! Aloha for now…Glenn.

"So far 2008, for the globe, has been quite cold, only just above the 1961-90 average," said Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia which supplies global temperature data to the United Nations. "This is just January and February, so two coolish months comparable to what happened in 1994 and 1996," he told Reuters. The northern spring formally begins on March 20 this year. And an underlying warming trend, blamed by the U.N. Climate Panel on human use of fossil fuels, is likely to reassert itself after the end of a La Nina cooling of the Pacific in the coming months. There were similar conditions in 1998 and 2005, the hottest so far, Jones said.

Interesting2: Scientists know that air pollution particles from mid-latitude cities migrate to the Arctic and form an ugly haze, but a new University of Utah study finds surprising evidence that polar explorers saw the same phenomenon as early as 1870.  “The reaction from some colleagues — when we first mentioned that people had seen haze in the late 1800s — was that it was crazy,” says Tim Garrett, assistant professor of meteorology and senior author of the study. “Who would have thought the Arctic could be so polluted back then? Our instinctive reaction is to believe the world was a cleaner place 130 years ago.” The study will be published soon in the March 2008 issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.  By searching through historic records written by early Arctic explorers, Garrett and his collaborator Lisa Verzella, former undergraduate student at the University of Utah, were able to find evidence of an aerosol “dry haze” that settled onto the ice to form a layer of grayish dust containing metallic particles. The haze and dust were likely the byproducts of smelting and coal combustion generated during the Industrial Revolution.

Interesting4: Birds start singing in the spring because of a biological response to longer days, researchers said on Wednesday. When birds are exposed to light for longer periods, certain brain cells trigger a series of hormonal reactions telling them to find a mating partner, which they do by singing, a team of Japanese and British researchers reported in the journal Nature. "While we knew what area of the brain was affected by seasonal change, until now we did not know the exact mechanism involved," said Peter Sharp, a researcher at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh, who worked on the study.

The researchers, led by Takashi Yoshimura of the Nagoya University in Japan, scanned 38,000 genes present in brain samples taken from Japanese quails to see which of the birds’ genes were affected by varying degrees of light. Genes in cells on the surface of the brain switched on when the birds received more light and began releasing a thyroid-stimulating hormone. The genes activated 14 hours after dawn on the first day of sufficient length, the researchers said.