May 15-16 2008

Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Thursday: 

Lihue, Kauai – 83
Honolulu, Oahu – 84
Kaneohe, Oahu – 87
Kahului, Maui – 85
Hilo, Hawaii – 84
Kailua-Kona, Hawaii – 82

Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level at 4 p.m. Thursday afternoon:

Honolulu, Oahu – 82F
Hilo, Hawaii – 78   

Precipitation Totals – The following numbers represent the largest precipitation totals (inches) during the last 24 hours on each of the major islands, as of Thursday afternoon: 

0.01  Mount Waialeale, Kauai
0.01 Palolo Fire Station, Oahu
0.00 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.00 Kahoolawe
0.21 Kaupo Gap, Maui
0.29 Kealakekua, Big Island

Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a dissipating cold front near Kauai and Oahu. This weather feature is keeping our trade wind producing high pressure ridge near the Islands now…and our local winds light and variable in direction. Light easterly trade winds will begin to appear Saturday.

Satellite and Radar Images: To view the cloud conditions we have here in Hawaii, please use the following satellite links, starting off with the Infrared Satellite Image of the islands to see all the clouds around the state during the day and night. This next image is one that gives close images of the islands only during the daytime hours, and is referred to as a Close-up visible image. This next image shows a larger view of the Pacific…giving perspective to the wider ranging cloud patterns in the Pacific Ocean…out from the islands. To help you keep track of where any showers may be around the islands, here’s the latest animated radar image. 

Hawaii’s Mountains – Here’s a link to the live webcam on the summit of near 14,000 foot Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. The tallest peak on the island of Maui is the Haleakala Crater, which is near 10,000 feet in elevation. These two webcams are available during the daylight hours here in the islands…and when there’s a big moon rising just after sunset for an hour or two! Plus, during the nights and early mornings you will be able to see stars, and the sunrise too…depending upon cloud conditions.

Aloha Paragraphs


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Volcanic haze over Waikiki
Photo Credit: flickr.com

A high pressure ridge has been pushed down near the Big Island, by a weakening cold front near Kauai. The ridges position close to the Big Island will keep light and variable winds over the Big Island. The islands from Maui up through Kauai will remain in a light Kona wind condition Thursday. As the cold front dissipates Friday, the ridge will migrate northward over the islands again, returning light and variable winds to the entire state. The hazy conditions will remain in place until the trade winds return this weekend.

Despite the presence of the late season cold front, there won’t be much precipitation around…although Kauai and Oahu may see a few showers. The atmosphere will remain rather muggy, as the air flow is coming up from the deeper tropics to our south. There will be a few showers, but overall, our weather will remain quite dry and stable. As the ridge comes back up over the state Friday, we will move back into a light wind convective weather pattern, with a few afternoon interior showers falling locally.

An unusually late season cold front was located between Kauai and Oahu Thursday evening. This IR satellite image shows the ragged leading edge of this frontal boundary. If this were happening during the winter months, or even earlier this spring, we might expect wetter conditions. Since we’re just a month or so away from the summer solstice, its too late in the spring…to wring much moisture out of this last cold front of the season.

The main concern remains the volcanic haze that is being carried up over the state of Hawaii, from the two volcanic vents on the Big Island. The haze will be most thick and troublesome right around the vents, plaguing the local population on the Big Island. The rest of the islands will have varying amounts of vog. We will have to wait until this weekend, when the trade winds start to blow, to see the gradual ventilation of the haze, or at least the beginning of that process. 

~~~ Thursday was a voggy day there in the Aloha state, no doubt about it. This volcanic haze has enveloped the entire state, from the northernmost island of Kauai, right down the chain, to the Big Island in the south. Looking out the window here in Kihei, Maui, we’re pretty much soaked in with vog, with what I would consider very poor air visibilities! The sunset this evening will be muted at best, probably just a red ball sinking into the Pacific Ocean to our west. Unfortunately, we seem to be having more and more of this hazy weather lately. One of my friends recently asked me, "Is this perma-vog Glenn"…I reassured her, at least the best that I could, that that was not going to be the case. The folks on the Big Island will have to contend with this stuff more than the rest of the state though, especially the Kau District, and then at times wrapping around into the Kona area as well.

~~~ We’ll see yet another day or even two, with rather thick vog hanging around. There is light at the end of the tunnel however, or in this case, clearer skies ahead. As the trade winds pick up this weekend, there will begin to be some increased detail to our local mountains and valleys. It may take most of the upcoming weekend before the trade winds are fully able to bring back our more normal better quality air visibilities. I’ll be back very early Friday morning with your next new weather narrative from paradise, yes, it is still paradise…despite the hazy conditions! I hope you have a great Thursday night wherever you happen to be reading from! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting: Greenhouse gases are at higher levels in the atmosphere than at any time in at least 800,000 years, according to a study of Antarctic ice on Wednesday that extends evidence that mankind is disrupting the climate.  Carbon dioxide and methane trapped in tiny bubbles of air in ancient ice down to 3,200 meters (10,500 ft) below the surface of Antarctica add 150,000 years of data to climate records stretching back 650,000 years from shallower ice drilling.  "We can firmly say that today’s concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane are 28 and 124 percent higher respectively than at any time during the last 800,000 years," said Thomas Stocker, an author of the report at the University of Berne.  Before the Industrial Revolution, levels of greenhouse gases were guided mainly by long-term shifts in the earth’s orbit around the sun that have plunged the planet into ice ages and back again eight times in the past 800,000 years.  The U.N. Climate Panel last year blamed human activities, led by burning of fossil fuels that release heat-trapping gases, for modern global warming that may disrupt water and food supplies with ever more droughts, floods and heat waves.  "The driving forces now are very much different from the driving forces in the past when there was only natural variation," Stocker told Reuters of the study in the journal Nature by scientists in Switzerland, France and Germany.

Interesting2: A new NASA-led study shows human-caused climate change has made an impact on a wide range of Earth’s natural systems, including permafrost thawing, plants blooming earlier across Europe, and lakes declining in productivity in Africa.  Cynthia Rosenzweig of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Science in New York and scientists at 10 other institutions have linked physical and biological impacts since 1970 with rises in temperatures during that period. The study, to be published May 15 in the journal Nature, concludes human-caused warming is resulting in a broad range of impacts across the globe.  "This is the first study to link global temperature data sets, climate model results, and observed changes in a broad range of physical and biological systems to show the link between humans, climate, and impacts," said Rosenzweig, lead author of the study. Rosenzweig and colleagues also found the link between human-caused climate change and observed impacts on Earth holds true at the scale of individual continents, particularly in North America, Europe, and Asia. To arrive at the link, the authors built and analyzed a database of more than 29,000 data series pertaining to observed impacts on Earth’s natural systems. The data were collected from about 80 studies, each with at least 20 years of records between 1970 and 2004.

Interesting3: The universe is twice as bright as it appears, astronomers now suggest.  The light bulb went on when they calculated that dust blocks about the half the light emitted from stars and galaxies.  Astronomers have known about interstellar dust for a while, but they haven’t been able to quantify just how much light it blocks. Now a team of researchers has studied a catalogue of galaxies and found that dust shields roughly 50 percent of their light.  "I was shocked by the sheer scale of the effect," said Simon Driver, an astronomer from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland who led the study. "Most people just kind of said, ‘We suspect dust is a minor problem.’ I spent much of my career working on deep images from Hubble and I’ve always ignored dust almost entirely." The result will likely cause many astronomers to revise their calculations of the intrinsic brightness of many celestial objects, Driver said. Until now, many astronomers thought stars and galaxies were really about 10 percent brighter in optical light than they appeared because of dust. If the new findings are true, it turns out that objects in the sky are about twice as bright than they appear. "This is a strong, clear-cut result," Driver told SPACE.com. "We’ve really got to take dust seriously and we’ve got to make large adjustments to our magnitude calculations." (A magnitude scale is used to define brightness of celestial objects.) The astronomers detailed their findings in the May 10 issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters.