Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs

A great beach on the south shore of Maui

Locally blustery trade winds will continue to blow into mid-week, then taper off a little. We’ll see light to moderately strong trade winds blowing across the entire state now, with those usual windiest areas finding considerably stronger and gustier conditions. A small craft wind advisory is now active in the waters around the Big Island and Maui. The computer forecast have been fluctuating on the wind conditions for the weekend, it now appears that light trade winds will continue…keeping the volcanic haze restricted to some parts of the Big Island.

The overlying atmosphere is relatively dry and stable now, which is limiting shower production. Whatever showers that do fall, will concentrating their efforts best along the windward coasts and slopes through most of the next week. The leeward sides will remain on the dry side, although the fast paced trade winds may carry a few stray showers over into those areas at times, only on the smaller islands however. High cirrus clouds will be on the increase soon, although they are high up in the atmosphere, and don’t drop rain.

It’s Monday evening as I begin writing this last section of today’s narrative.  Monday was a pretty nice day, with the strong and gusty trade winds being the most notable weather feature. The strongest gusts, in those windiest areas, topped 40 mph…which is pretty impressive.  At 4pm Monday afternoon, the winds were still gusting to 42 mph at Maalaea Bay here on Maui. Meanwhile, at higher levels of the atmosphere, icy cirrus clouds were still streaming across island skies. This looping satellite image shows these bright, white clouds moving along in association with the subtropical jet stream. The models show that this high canopy of clouds may increase further over the next couple of days. This will certainly dim and filter our sunshine…although on the positive side, provide nice sunset and sunrise colors! I’ll be back very early Tuesday morning with your next new weather narrative from paradise. I hope you have a great Monday night until then! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting: Before humans began burning fossil fuels, there was an eons-long balance between carbon dioxide emissions and Earth’s ability to absorb them, but now the planet can’t keep up, scientists say.  The finding, reported in the journal Nature Geoscience, relies on ancient Antarctic ice bubbles that contain air samples going back 610,000 years.  Climate scientists for the last 25 years or so have suggested that some kind of natural mechanism regulates our planet’s temperature and the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Those skeptical about human influence on global warming point to this as the cause for recent climate change.  This research is likely the first observable evidence for this natural mechanism.  This mechanism, known as "feedback," has been thrown out of whack by a steep rise in carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of coal and petroleum for the last 200 years or so, said Richard Zeebe, a co-author of the report.  "These feedbacks operate so slowly that they will not help us in terms of climate change … that we’re going to see in the next several hundred years," Zeebe said by telephone from the University of Hawaii. "Right now we have put the system entirely out of equilibrium."  In the ancient past, excess carbon dioxide came mostly from volcanoes, which spewed very little of the chemical compared to what humans activities do now, but it still had to be addressed.

Interesting2: Dutch ecologist Roxina Soler and her colleagues have discovered that subterranean and above ground herbivorous insects can communicate with each other by using plants as telephones. Subterranean insects issue chemical warning signals via the leaves of the plant. This way, aboveground insects are alerted that the plant is already” occupied’.  Aboveground, leaf-eating insects prefer plants that have not yet been occupied by subterranean root-eating insects. Subterranean insects emit chemical signals via the leaves of the plant, which warn the aboveground insects about their presence. This messaging enables spatially-separated insects to avoid each other, so that they do not unintentionally compete for the same plant. In recent years it has been discovered that different types of aboveground insects develop slowly if they feed on plants that also have subterranean residents and vice versa. It seems that a mechanism has developed via natural selection, which enables the subterranean and aboveground insects to detect each other. This avoids unnecessary competition.