May 16-17 2008

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

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

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

Barking Sands, Kauai – 82F
Molokai airport – 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 Friday afternoon: 

0.22  Hanapepe, Kauai
0.01 Makua Ridge, Oahu
0.00 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.00 Kahoolawe
0.05 Pukalani, Maui
0.67 Laupahoehoe, Big Island

Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a dissipating cold front near Kauai. This weather feature is keeping our trade wind producing high pressure ridge near the Islands…although it will be migrating northward slowly. Light easterly trade winds will begin blow across the state through the weekend.

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



Volcanic haze gives pink sunsets in Hawaii
Photo Credit: flickr.com

A dissipating cold front is located just to the north of Kauai Friday evening, which will keep our winds light into the weekend. As the cold front washes out over the next 24 hours, a trade wind producing ridge of high pressure will migrate to a position just north of the islands again…returning light trades to our islands…gradually. The thick volcanic haze will take some time to clear out our local skies, although slowly improving air visibilities are on the way. 

The overlying atmosphere remains dry and stable, limiting showers just about everywhere here in Hawaii. There will be a few possible showers here and there, but our weather will remain quite dry going into the weekend. As the trade winds filter back into the state over the next several days, into early in the new week ahead, we’ll see a few showers falling along the windward sides.

The late season cold front isn’t dissipating quick as fast as expected, keeping the trade winds at bay for a while longer yet. This IR satellite image shows what’s left of the gradually weakening frontal boundary. This cloud band will disappear from our Hawaiian Island weather picture at some point this weekend, paving the way for the return of light trade winds.

The main weather related concern continues to be the volcanic haze hanging over the Hawaiian Islands Friday night. The haze will be most thick and troublesome right around the volcanic vents, plaguing the local population on the Big Island. The rest of the islands will have thick vog as well, with poor visibilites common. We will have to wait until this weekend, when the trade winds start to blow lightly, to see the gradual ventilation of the haze…although it will be slow going at first. 

The latest computer forecast models are showing another round of unusual weather beginning later next week. It’s too early in the game to get all worked-up over this prospect, as what the models are pointing out would be very unusual for this time of year! Nonetheless, the models are showing a very dynamic upper level low pressure system digging down over the islands around the middle of next week. A surface reflection, in the form of a very late season cold front, would be approaching the state from the northwest towards the weekend. This is very similar to what we’re involved in now, almost a mirror image in some ways. The negative part of this potential weather situation would be the fact that our local winds would turn southeast again…ushering in thick volcanic haze over the state again late next week! We have plenty of time to make major revisions along the way, so let’s just hang loose about this for the time being.

~~~ It’s Friday evening here in the islands as I begin this last section of today’s narrative. As is my habit, I’ll be taking in a new film tonight. I’ll see Iron Man (2008), starring Robert Downey, Jeff Bridges, Terrence Howard, Shaun Toub, and Gwyneth Paltrow. Robert Downey Jr. stars as Tony Stark, a billionaire playboy and genius who puts as much effort into chasing skirts as he puts into chasing his next big idea. A trip to Afghanistan to sell weapons quickly devolves into chaos, and Stark finds himself at the mercy of a warlord who wants him to build a missile. Instead, Stark creates a powerful suit of armor, turning him into Iron Man and allowing him to escape. When he returns to America, his assistant Pepper Pots (Gwyneth Paltrow), friend Rhodey (Terrence Howard), and right-hand man Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges) all marvel at the change in the man they knew…who is ready to save the world. Everyone is raving about this film, and I for one have been looking forward to seeing it for a long time! Here’s a trailer for your enjoyment.

~~~ I’ll be back early Saturday morning with your next new weather narrative. This will include more reports about the persistent voggy weather, and when exactly the trade winds will finally clear our local skies from this thick haze. I’ll have more up-to-date information about the next round of increasing vog on tap for later next week…at least maybe it will come back on us. I’ll have a movie review for you in the morning as well. I hope you have a great Friday night wherever you happen to be spending it! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting: The world’s species are declining at a rate "unprecedented since the extinction of the dinosaurs", a census of the animal kingdom has revealed. The Living Planet Index out today shows the devastating impact of humanity as biodiversity has plummeted by almost a third in the 35 years to 2005. The report, produced by WWF, the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and the Global Footprint Network, says land species have declined by 25 per cent, marine life by 28 per cent, and freshwater species by 29 per cent.  Jonathan Loh, editor of the report, said that such a sharp fall was "completely unprecedented in terms of human history". "You’d have to go back to the extinction of the dinosaurs to see a decline as rapid as this," he added. "In terms of human lifespan we may be seeing things change relatively slowly, but in terms of the world’s history this is very rapid." And "rapid" is putting it mildly. Scientists say the current extinction rate now up to 10,000 times faster than what has historically been recorded as normal.

Interesting2: 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.

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.

Interesting4: Peering beneath the ice at the north pole of Mars has now revealed the red planet may be surprisingly colder than was thought. Any liquid water that might exist on Mars therefore might be hidden deeper than once suspected, closer to that world’s warm heart, researchers suggested. An international team of scientists used the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to probe the north pole of the red planet with radar. The ice cap there goes about 1.2 miles deep (2 km) and is roughly the size of Pakistan at 310,000 square miles large (800,000 square km).  These scans revealed the polar cap has up to four layers of ice rich in sand and dust, each separated by clearer sheets of nearly pure ice. Each dirty and clean layer is some 1,000 feet thick (300 meters). These dirty and clean layers were created by ages of intense dust storms followed by icy eras.

This five-million-year-long cycle was likely driven by wobbles in Mars’ tilt and fluctuations in the shape of its orbit around the sun. The more sunlight the red planet saw because of these changes, the more the polar icecaps retreated and the more dust storms Mars saw. "All this layering is key evidence for theoretical models that predict that changes in Mars’ climate are coupled with orbital changes," said researcher Roger Phillips, a geophysicist at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder. Unexpectedly, the radar scans also revealed the massive weight of the ice cap does not deform any underlying sediment. This implies the crust beneath the cap is strong — more than 180 miles thick (300 km). To have such a thick crust, "Mars might be colder than we thought," Phillips told SPACE.com. As a result, any liquid water that might be underground has to be buried even deeper than once speculated. "If one thought that liquid water was 5 kilometers deep (3 miles), it’s now at least 30 percent deeper than that," he said. Philips and his colleagues detailed their findings online May 15 in the journal Science.