Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs

Interesting: A thick layer of yellow dust blanketed houses and cars in the Iraqi capital Thursday as a heavy sandstorm over central Iraq sent dozens of residents to hospitals with breathing difficulties. The spring storm, one of the worst in years, forced the closure of the Baghdad International Airport. It also appeared to hamper military flights. None of the helicopter patrols that regularly roar over the city of 6 million people seemed to be airborne. Many shops in the city were closed, and only a few cars were seen on the deserted streets. AP Television News footage also showed Iraqi traffic policemen wearing masks over their mouths as protection from the dust whipped up by the hot winds.

Interesting2: Planet Earth continues to run a fever. Last month was the warmest March on record over land surfaces of the world and the second warmest overall worldwide. For the United States, however, it was just an average March, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported Thursday.NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center said high temperatures over much of Asia pulled the worldwide land temperature up to an average of 40.8 degrees, 3.2 degrees warmer than the average in the 20th century. While Asia had its greatest January snow cover this year, warm March readings caused a rapid melt and March snow cover on the continent was a record low. Global ocean temperatures were the 13th warmest on record, with a weakening of the La Nina conditions that cool the tropical Pacific Ocean. Overall land and sea surface temperatures for the world were second highest in 129 years of record keeping, trailing only 2002, the agency said. Warming conditions in recent decades have continued to raise concern about global climate change, which many weather and climate experts believe is related to gases released into the atmosphere by industrial and transportation processes. The climate center said that for the 48 contiguous United States it was about average, ranking as the 63rd warmest March in 113 years of record keeping.

Interesting3: Major floods striking America’s heartland this week offer a preview of the spring seasonal outlook, according to NOAA’s National Weather Service. Several factors will contribute to above-average flood conditions, including record rainfall in some states and snow packs, which are melting and causing rivers and streams to crest over their banks. This week, more than 250 communities in a dozen states are experiencing flood conditions. The science supporting NOAA’s short-term forecasts allows for a high level of certainty. National Weather Service forecasters highlighted potential for the current major flood event a week in advance and began working with emergency managers to prepare local communities for the impending danger.  “We expect rains and melting snow to bring more flooding this spring,” said Vickie Nadolski, deputy director of NOAA’sNational Weather Service. “Americans should be on high alert to flood conditions in your communities. Arm yourselves with information about how to stay safe during a flood and do not attempt to drive on flooded roadways — remember to always turn around, don’t drown.”

Interesting4: Hurricanes in some areas, including the North Atlantic, are likely to become more intense as a result of global warming even though the number of such storms worldwide may decline, according to a new study by MIT researchers.

Kerry Emanuel, the lead author of the new study, wrote a paper in 2005 reporting an apparent link between a warming climate and an increase in hurricane intensity. That paper attracted worldwide attention because it was published in Nature just three weeks before Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans.

Emanuel, a professor of atmospheric science in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, says the new research provides an independent validation of the earlier results, using a completely different approach. The paper was co-authored by postdoctoral fellow Ragoth Sundararajan and graduate student John Williams and appeared last week in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

While the earlier study was based entirely on historical records of past hurricanes, showing nearly a doubling in the intensity of Atlantic storms over the last 30 years, the new work is purely theoretical. It made use of a new technique to add finer-scale detail to computer simulations called Global Circulation Models, which are the basis for most projections of future climate change.

Interesting5: The jet stream — America‘s stormy weather maker — is creeping northward and weakening, new research shows. That potentially means less rain in the already dry South and Southwest and more storms in the North. And it could also translate into more and stronger hurricanes since the jet stream suppresses their formation. The study’s authors said they have to do more research to pinpoint specific consequences. From 1979 to 2001, the Northern Hemisphere’s jet stream moved northward on average at a rate of about 1.25 miles a year, according to the paper published Friday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The authors suspect global warming is the cause, but have yet to prove it. The jet stream is a high-speed, constantly shifting river of air about 30,000 feet above the ground that guides storm systems and cool air around the globe. And when it moves away from a region, high pressure and clear skies predominate.  Two other jet streams in the Southern Hemisphere are also shifting poleward, the study found. The northern jet stream "is the dominant thing that creates weather systems for the United States,” said study co-author Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Stanford, Calif. "Bascially look south of where you are and that’s probably a good guess of what your weather may be like in a few decades.”

The study looked at the average location of the constantly moving jet stream and found that when looked at over decades, it has shifted northward. The study’s authors and other scientists suggest that the widening of the Earth’s tropical belt — a development documented last year — is pushing the three jet streams toward the poles.

Climate models have long predicted that with global warming, the world’s jet streams would move that way, so it makes sense to think that’s what happening, Caldeira said. However, proving it is a rigorous process, using complex computer models to factor in all sorts of possibilities. That has not been done yet.