Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs

Full moon rising over the Haleakala Crater on Maui
Photo Credit: flickr.com

We’ll see another day of light to almost moderately strong trade winds, before they ease up on Wednesday. A trade wind producing ridge of high pressure is north of Kauai Monday evening. These cooling and refreshing trade breezes will continue the clearing our local skies of the haze now. As Wednesday arrives, another late season cold front will push our ridge down over or near the state…with light winds, and more volcanic haze arriving locally then.

The trade winds will carry some moisture our way over the next couple of days. The atmosphere remains dry and stable however, which will limit the amount of those windward biased showers quite a bit. The leeward sides will be generally dry, with lots of sunshine beaming down during the days. Nice weather will prevail through the next several days. Our weather will take a turn back into a light wind convective weather pattern by mid-week.

~~~ The next couple of nights will be good ones to gaze up. The May full moon is happening, and will fill our after dark hours with lots of reflected sunlight. Speaking of the Moon, this month’s full Moon is the smallest of 2008. Remember that the Moon’s orbit is not perfectly circular but elliptical so there is a closest and farthest point to the Earth every month, called perigee and apogee, respectively. This month’s full Moon coincides with its apogee, therefore making it appear smaller in the sky. The difference visually is less than 10% and most people will probably not notice it, but pictures of the Moon compared at both extremes (perigee and apogee) will definitely show the difference.

~~~ I don’t know about you, but I’ll be looking for that full moon the next couple of nights. I’ll be back here 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: Marine scientists surveying a large undersea mountain chain were amazed to find millions of tiny starfish swirling their arms to capture food in the undersea current. An expedition by 19 scientists, including five from Australia, studied the geology and biology of eight Macquarie Ridge sea mounts. They are part of a string of underwater volcanoes — dormant for millions of years — that stretches 875 miles from south of New Zealand toward Antarctica. The scientists also investigated the world’s biggest ocean current — the Antarctic Circumpolar Current — amid expectations they would find evidence of climate change in the Southern Ocean. While the expedition’s cameras found a wide range of corals, a high density of cardinal fish and the huge coral, the vast collection of brittle stars was the highlight of the voyage. "I’ve personally never seen anything like this — all these animals, the sheer volume — all waiting for food from the current,” expedition member and marine biologist Dr. Mireille Consalvey said Monday. "It challenged what we as scientists thought we knew.” Expedition leader and marine biologist Ashley Rowden said starfish usually cover only slopes away from the top of the undersea mountains. "It got us excited as soon as we saw it,” Rowden said of the site, dubbed "BrittleStarCity.”

Interesting2: Global warming isn’t to blame for the recent jump in hurricanes in the Atlantic, concludes a study by a prominent federal scientist whose position has shifted on the subject. Not only that, warmer temperatures will actually reduce the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic and those making landfall, research meteorologist Tom Knutson reported in a study released Sunday. In the past, Knutson has raised concerns about the effects of climate change on storms. His new paper has the potential to heat up a simmering debate among meteorologists about current and future effects of global warming in the Atlantic. Ever since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, hurricanes have often been seen as a symbol of global warming’s wrath. Many climate change experts have tied the rise of hurricanes in recent years to global warming and hotter waters that fuel them. Another group of experts, those who study hurricanes and who are more often skeptical about global warming, say there is no link. They attribute the recent increase to a natural multi-decade cycle. What makes this study different is Knutson, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s fluid dynamics lab in Princeton, N.J. He has warned about the harmful effects of climate change and has even complained in the past about being censored by the Bush administration on past studies on the dangers of global warming. He said his new study, based on a computer model, argues "against the notion that we’ve already seen a really dramatic increase in Atlantic hurricane activity resulting from greenhouse warming.”

Interesting3: While carbon dioxide has been getting lots of publicity in climate change, reactive forms of nitrogen are also building up in the environment, scientists warn. "The public does not yet know much about nitrogen, but in many ways it is as big an issue as carbon, and due to the interactions of nitrogen and carbon, makes the challenge of providing food and energy to the world’s peoples without harming the global environment a tremendous challenge," University of Virginia environmental sciences professor James Galloway said in a statement.  "We are accumulating reactive nitrogen in the environment at alarming rates, and this may prove to be as serious as putting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere," said Galloway, author of a paper and co-author of a second on the topic in Friday’s issue of the journal Science. While nitrogen alone is inert and harmless, reactive nitrogen compounds — such as ammonia — have been released by its use in nitrogen-based fertilizers and the large-scale burning of fossil fuels. Various forms of nitrogen contribute to greenhouse warming, smog, haze, acid rain dead zones with little or no life along the coasts, and depletion of the ozone layer in the stratosphere, the researchers concluded. The researchers propose ways to reduce nitrogen use, ranging from encouraging its uptake by plants to recovering and reusing nitrogen from manure and sewage and decreasing nitrogen emissions from fossil fuel combustion.

Interesting4: The El Nino phenomenon that has puzzled climate scientists in recent decades may have assisted the first trip around the world nearly 500 years ago. Explorer Ferdinand Magellan encountered fair weather on Nov. 28, 1520, after days of battle through the rough waters south of South America. From there his passage across the Pacific Ocean may have been eased by the calming effects of El Nino, researchers speculate in a new study. When an El Nino occurs, the waters of the Equatorial Pacific become warmer than normal, creating rising air that changes wind and weather patterns. The effects can be worldwide, including drought in the western Pacific and more rain in Peru and the west coast of South America. Tree ring data indicate that an El Nino was occurring in 1519 and 1520 and may even have begun in 1518. After passing through the strait later named for him, Magellan sailed north along the South American coast and then turned northwest, crossing the equator and eventually arriving at the Philippines, where he was killed in a battle with natives. Magellan was seeking the so-called spice islands, now part of Indonesia, and his course took him north of that goal. But the route may have been dictated by mild conditions and favorable winds during an El Nino, anthropologists Scott M. Fitzpatrick of North Carolina State University and Richard Callaghan of the University of Calgary, Canada, propose in a new study of his trip. Their research is summarized in Friday’s edition of the journal Science and is scheduled to be published in full in the August edition of the Journal of Pacific History.