Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs

The Kona coast on the Big Island

The typical springtime trade winds will continue to blow over the Hawaiian Islands. We’ll see light to moderately strong trade winds blowing into Wednesday. The computer forecast models show that the trade winds will increase a notch or two Thursday through the rest of the week. There are no small craft wind advisories active in Hawaii’s coastal or channel waters at the moment, but will likely be needed during the second half of the week. These persistent trade winds will continue on into next week, providing fair weather.

These trade winds will carry a few showers our way, depositing them most generously along the windward sides of the islands. The overlying atmosphere remains just a little shower prone, so that there won’t be any unusual rainfall activity. The leeward beaches will be generally quite dry, although a few showers could fall locally. It appears that there will be little change in this more or less normal trade wind weather pattern this week, although we could use more showers as we head towards our dry summer season.

It’s Tuesday evening as I begin writing this last section of today’s narrative.  As noted above, there’s nothing unusual happening here in the Hawaiian Islands at the moment. As this looping satellite image shows, the latest stream of high clouds to the west and southwest of the state, have now dropped south over or near the Big Island. There’s another batch of high clouds associated with a trough of low pressure to the west of Kauai this evening. Some of this seems to be sweeping over the Kauai end of the island chain, which may spread over the central islands during the night. 

~~~ I hope you have a great Tuesday night wherever you are spending it! I’ll be back very early Wednesday morning with your next new weather narrative from paradise. Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting: For eight years, Tony and Sam Bayaoa have grown thousands of bright red, yellow and pink protea flowers on their farm. Then in March, Kilauea volcano opened a new vent and began spewing double the usual amount of toxic gas.  Now about 70 percent of their crop is dried, brown and brittle. "The first reaction was — did someone poison the plants?" said Tony Bayaoa, whose two-acre farm is 35 miles from the volcano. "I’ve lost my livelihood." Big Island crops are shriveling, as sulfur dioxide from Kilauea wafts over them and envelops them in "vog," or volcanic smog. People are wheezing, and schoolchildren are being kept indoors during recess. High gas levels led Hawaii Volcanoes National Park to close several days last month, forcing the evacuation of thousands of visitors. Residents of this volcanic island are used to toxic gas. But this haze is so bad that farmers are thinking about growing different crops, and many people are worrying about their health. Kirk Brewer, 33, an electrician who moved to the Big Island in 2006 from Southern California, blames his headaches and wife Tracy‘s itchy skin, sore throat and runny nose on the vog. "It’s a bummer when you go to the other islands and see how clear and blue it is, but we’ll just deal with it," Brewer said. When educator Ann Peterson of Kona went to the bank last week, she and the teller were making the same noises in their throats. They looked at each other and said in unison, "Vog!" Kilauea on the BigIsland has been erupting continuously since 1983. But in mid-March, a new vent formed at the summit, giving Kilauea two large sulfur dioxide outlets instead of one.

Interesting2: Using sophisticated unmanned aircraft, research scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego hope to assess Southern California’s potential for climate change and better understand the sources of air pollution. Funded by the California Energy Commission, the California AUAV Air Pollution Profiling Study (CAPPS) uses autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (AUAVs) to gather meteorological data as the aircraft fly through clouds and aerosol masses in Southern California skies. The flights will take place at Edwards Air Force Base near Rosamond, Calif. The study began its first sortie of data-gathering flights in April 2008. Scripps Atmospheric and Climate Sciences Professor V. Ramanathan, CAPPS’s lead scientist, said the characteristics of Southern California climate and meteorology – ranging from its dry weather to its tendency to trap rather than export smog – could make it especially prone to climate change consequences of air pollution such as accelerated snowmelt and dimming at ground level.

Interesting3: There’s a downside to nearly all renewable energy technologies available for homeowners. Cost.  Though over time a solar power or small wind system may pay for itself in savings from not buying fuels or power from the grid, the initial outlay for renewable energy is staggering for mere mortals. Despite the wisdom of a penny saved is a penny earned, most Americans consider sales price first, long term savings last.  However simple, low tech, clever products or affordable high tech plug and play technologies may be the key to bringing renewable energy into the home. For example a water-filled black rubber, plastic or even canvas bag hung from a tree limb is a way for campers to grab a hot shower courtesy of the heat of the Sun. Like the hot water that flows from a garden hose lying on the ground on a sunny day, given a few hours a sack of water hanging in the sunlight will provide a soothing, though brief, shower. These solar water heaters are plentiful through camping and outdoor supply outlets. (The technology has advanced, too, with some models offering battery-powered pumps so the solar heated water can be used for more than showers.)

Interesting4: Scientists at the University of Konstanz in Germany and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated an ultrafast laser that offers a record combination of high speed, short pulses and high average power. The same NIST group also has shown that this type of laser, when used as a frequency comb—an ultraprecise technique for measuring different colors of light—could boost the sensitivity of astronomical tools searching for other Earthlike planets as much as 100 fold. The dime-sized laser, to be described Thursday, May 8, at the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics,* emits 10 billion pulses per second, each lasting about 40 femtoseconds (quadrillionths of a second), with an average power of 650 milliwatts. For comparison, the new laser produces pulses 10 times more often than a standard NIST frequency comb while producing much shorter pulses than other lasers operating at comparable speeds. The new laser is also 100 to 1000 times more powerful than typical high-speed lasers, producing clearer signals in experiments. The laser was built by Albrecht Bartels at the Center for Applied Photonics of the University of Konstanz.

Interesting5: Polar bears may have it relatively easy. It’s the tropical creatures that could really struggle if the climate warms even a few degrees in places that are already hot, scientists reported on Monday.  That doesn’t mean polar bears and other wildlife in the polar regions won’t feel the impact of climate change. They probably will, because that is where the warming is expected to be most extreme, as much as 18 degrees F (10 degrees C) by the end of this century.  But there are far fewer species living in the Arctic and Antarctic and in the temperate zones than in the tropics, said Curtis Deutsch of the University of California at Los Angeles.  Many of these tropical creatures are living at the edge of their temperature tolerance already. Even the slight tropical warming predicted by 2100 — 5.4 degrees F (3 degrees C) — could push them to the brink, Deutsch said in a telephone interview.  In research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Deutsch and his co-authors investigated what could happen to cold-blooded animals in the tropics over the next 100 years if the predictions of greenhouse warming hold true.  They chose cold-blooded creatures — mostly insects but also frogs, lizards and turtles — because warm-blooded animals have other ways of regulating their body temperatures, such as growing a thick coat of fur to guard against cold and shedding when it gets warm.