Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha Paragraphs

A Hawaiian sunset on the Kona coast

The trade winds will start to slow down a little now, although remain locally quite gusty through Friday. We’ll see moderately strong trade winds blowing across the entire state, although those windiest areas will find stronger and gustier conditions. A small craft wind advisory is now limited to the coastal waters around the Big Island…plus the major channels between the islands. The computer forecast models show that the trade winds will continue through the rest of the week…into next week.

The air mass over the islands remains dry and stable, limiting rainfall for the time being. There will be a few light showers, restricted to the windward sides for the most part. It appears that we’ll begin to see a few more showers starting this weekend…again mostly along the windward coasts and slopes. Computer models suggest that right after the weekend, a precipitation enhancing trough of low pressure will develop to the west of the state. This increase in showers will remain anchored over the windward sides, with some quite generous locally.

It’s Thursday evening as I begin writing this last section of today’s narrative.  The dry trade wind weather that we saw on Wednesday and Thursday, will follow us right on into Friday. Thursday was a nice day, with more sunshine beaming down, than we’ve seen over the last several days. The day turned out to be about as close to a normal spring day as we’ve seen in some time. There were some clouds around, although hugging pretty close to the mountains, leaving the beaches alone in most areas. All that sunshine allowed afternoon temperatures to rise nicely into the 80F’s at all sea level locations, with the Honolulu airport’s 86F the hot spot for the day. ~~~ We’ll begin to see some increase in windward showers this weekend, although nothing too serious. As we push into early next week however, the models show an atmospheric destabilizing trough of low pressure settling into the area west of Kauai. If this manifests as the computer models indicate, our windward sides may get significantly wetter than they are now. ~~~ I hope you had a great Thursday, if you happened to be lounging on the beach here in Hawaii, or somewhere else away from the islands. I’ll be back very early Friday morning with your next new weather narrative from paradise. Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting: Japan has so far escaped the shortages of rice besetting other nations, but it’s running short of a food product the Japanese once disparagingly associated with foreigners — butter.  The Agriculture Ministry said Thursday it ordered the nation’s four major dairy producers to churn out more butter because the product is disappearing fast from store shelves as a result of a fall in milk supplies and higher demand from consumers, who are eating more bread these days.  Official Tsuyoshi Hashimoto said increased domestic production is more attractive than stepped up imports because foreign butter has become more expensive. A drought in Australia drove up the cost of cattle feed and demand for butter also has risen elsewhere in Asia.  The butter shortage is somewhat ironic for Japan, where Westerners centuries ago were told they "smelled of butter." But today, Japanese households consume about 13,800 tons of butter a year, and more is used by bakeries and other businesses.

Interesting2: The Proximity Hotel is proof that a hotel can be very green without sacrificing the comfort of its guests. The hotel is located in Greensboro, North Carolina, and it achieved a Gold LEED certification this year from the U.S. Green Building Council. The Proximity uses 36.5% less energy and 30% less water than a conventional hotel. It gets 60% of its hot water from 100 solar thermal panels on the roof. The hotel also boasts the first regenerative drive elevator, which recaptures energy as the elevator moves down.  The guest rooms take advantage of abundant natural lighting with large energy-efficient “operable” windows that measure 7’4” square.  The hotel has a green, vegetated rooftop on the restaurant to reduce the “urban heat island effect.” In other words, the green roof reflects the heat, thus reducing the amount of energy needed for refrigeration and/or air conditioning. It also slows the rain runoff and insulates the rooftop, keeping the building cooler overall. The hotel used building materials with recycled content. For example, reinforced steel contains 90% post consumer recycled content, sheetrock 100%, asphalt 25% and staircase steel 50%. Concrete contains 4% fly ash, the mineral residue left after the combustion of coal that is diverted from landfills.

Interesting3: Climate scientists using computer models to simulate the 1930s Dust Bowl on the U.S Great Plains have found that dust raised by farmers probably amplified and spread a natural drop in rainfall, turning an ordinary drying cycle into an agricultural collapse. The researcher say the study raises concern that current pressures on farmland from population growth and climate change could worsen current food crises by leading to similar events in other regions.  Recent studies indicate that periodic droughts in the western United States are controlled by naturally occurring periods of cool sea-surface water temperatures over the eastern tropical Pacific—so-called La Nina phases. Via long-distance winds, these phases indirectly affect faraway rain patterns. In addition to the 1930s, such patterns have occurred in the 1850-60s, 1870s, 1890s, 1950s, and 1999 to present.  What made the 1930s different was the arrival of farmers onto the Great Plains, where they replaced drought-resistant wild prairie grasses with fragile wheat, neglected to plant cover crops in unused fields, and allowed livestock to overgraze pastures.

Interesting4: Arctic sea ice, sometimes billed as Earth’s air conditioner for its moderating effects on world climate, will probably shrink to a record low level this year, scientists predicted on Wednesday.  In releasing the forecast, climate researcher Sheldon Drobot of the University of Colorado at Boulder called the changes in Arctic sea ice "one of the more compelling and obvious signs of climate change."  If that prediction holds true, it would be the third time in the past five years that Arctic sea ice retreated to record lows, the scientists said in a statement. That retreat is caused by warming temperatures and the spread of younger, thinner, less hardy ice in the region.  Based on satellite data and temperature records, the researchers forecast a 59 percent chance the annual minimum sea ice record would be broken again in 2008.  In the past decade, Arctic sea ice declined by roughly 10 percent, with a record drop in 2007 that left a total minimum ice cover of 1.59 million square miles. That represented a decline of 460,000 square miles from the previous record low in 2005 — an area the size of Texas and California combined. Scientists measure ice cover at its low ebb at the end of summer.  "The current Arctic ice cover is thinner and younger than at any previous time in our recorded history, and this sets the stage for rapid melt and a new record low," Drobot said.  Overall, 63 percent of the Arctic ice cover is younger than average, and only 2 percent is older than average, he said.