Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs

Sea cave on the Napali coast of Kauai
Photo Credit: flickr.com

Our local winds will remain light and variable, drifting in from the south and southeast for the time being, becoming trade winds Friday. A late season cold front has pushed our trade wind producing ridge down over the northern island of Kauai. This is why our trade winds have been located just to the south of Hawaii. This wind direction has carried volcanic haze up over the islands, along with muggy air from the deeper tropics too. The trade winds arrived back over the Big Island during the day Thursday, and will ride up over the rest of the island chain during the day Friday.

The light south winds near Kauai and Oahu, provided the impetus for localized heavy showers Wednesday  night into the day Thursday.  Our weather will remain in a light wind convective pattern Thursday, with the chance of more locally heavy downpours, especially on the Kauai end of the chain. The daytime heating may trigger showers for the other islands during the afternoons as well. The returning trades Friday into this weekend, will bring back a few showers to the windward sides then.

The current light south to southeast breezes have brought more of that infamous volcanic emission over the islands now. This vog hasn’t gotten as thick as it was last week, although its pretty darn thick! Fortunately, this will be a brief period of hazy weather, as by later Friday the trade winds will have begun carrying the haze away downstream of the Aloha state. We saw muted sunshine during the day Thursday, with much better air qualities and visibilities returning later Friday into this weekend.

I must say that I can hardly believe what I’m about to write next! The computer forecast models are showing another extremely late season cold front approaching the islands by the middle of next week! This will put us practically into the summer month of June, which is "way too late" to be seeing a cold front digging down this into the tropics…into our area of the central north Pacific. If this manifests as the models describe, this would be the third week in a row that we’ve seen very late season cold fronts pushing our trade winds down to the south of the islands. This in turn veers our winds to the southeast, carrying thick volcanic haze up over the islands!

~~~  Thursday was another very voggy day here in the state of Hawaii, at least on most of the islands. Here on Maui, late Thursday afternoon, it was not only hazy, but also quite cloudy. The rainiest rains during the last 24 hours fell on the islands of Kauai and Oahu. This will have been the last day of light south to southwest winds, with the trade winds arriving over all of the state by the end of the day Friday. This will begin the clearing process, with less haze as we move into the upcoming holiday weekend.

~~~ I’ll be back very early Friday morning, with your next new weather narrative from paradise, available right around 530am HST, which will be 830am PST, and 1130am on the east coast…which will cover most of the readers of this website. There are lots of you out there, as I did a search on all the major search engines today, typing in Hawaii Weather, which is fairly wide ranging search, and this website came up #1 on all of them! I’m thrilled that it is so easy to find this site, and that so many of you log on daily, or once in a while, whatever! I hope you have a great Thursday night wherever you happen to be reading from. Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting: NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center today announced that projected climate conditions point to a below-normal hurricane season in the eastern Pacific this year. The Climate Prediction Center outlook calls for a 70 percent probability of a below normal season, a 25 percent probability of a near normal season, and a 5 percent probably of an above normal season. Allowing for forecast uncertainties, seasonal hurricane forecasters estimate a 60 to 70 percent chance of 11 to 16 named storms, including five to eight hurricanes and one to three major hurricanes (category 3, 4, or 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale).

An average eastern Pacific hurricane season produces 15 to 16 named storms, with nine becoming hurricanes and four to five becoming major hurricanes. Among the factors influencing this year’s eastern Pacific outlook are the multi decadal signal – the atmospheric conditions that have decreased hurricane activity over the eastern Pacific Ocean since 1995 – and the expected lingering effects of La Niña.  “La Niña conditions have weakened since February and may become neutral by summer’s end,” said Gerry Bell, Ph.D., lead seasonal hurricane forecaster at the center. “We typically see less hurricane activity in the eastern Pacific when La Niña is active or neutral.”

Interesting2: Basic food crops dangerously vulnerable. In the case of wheat, for instance, as a deadly new strain of Black Stem Rust devastates harvests across Africa and Arabia, and threatens the staple food supply of a billion people from Egypt to Pakistan, the areas where potentially crop and life-saving remnant wild wheat relatives grow are only minimally protected.  “Our basic food plants have always been vulnerable to attack from new strains of disease or pests and the result is often mass hunger and starvation, as anyone who remembers their school history of the Irish Potato Famine will know,” said Liza Higgins-Zogib, Manager of People and Conservation at WWF International. 

“In more recent times we have avoided similar collapses in the production when disease strikes essential foodstuffs like wheat by developing new commercial varieties from naturally resistant wild relatives.”  “Unfortunately the natural habitat of most of the wild or traditional descendents of our modern food plants is without legal and physical protection, leaving them at risk.”   Also at risk are the indigenous and traditional peoples who are critical parts of the landscapes associated with crop wild relatives, who are losing their lands and cultural practices — which puts humanity’s food at even further risk.

Interesting3: The world’s poorest countries could pay 40 percent more for food this year than they did last year, according to a United Nations report released Thursday.  In those countries nearly a billion people are already on the brink of malnourishment and as food prices climb more at at risk of starving. The latest Food Outlook report, compiled by the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, shows that countries which spend a substantial part of their budgets on food will pay $169 billion this year for food imports. That is 40 percent higher than last year, and four times higher than in 2000. "Food is no longer the cheap commodity that it once was," FAO Assistant Director-general Hafez Ghanem said.

"Rising food prices are bound to worsen the already unacceptable level of food deprivation suffered by 854 million people. "We are facing the risk that the number of hungry will increase by many more millions of people." The FAO lists 82 countries as "Low-Income Food-Deficit Countries" which cannot produce or import enough food to meet their all their population’s needs. More than half of the countries are in Africa.

Interesting4: More than 50 percent of wide-ranging oceanic shark species are threatened with extinction as a result of overfishing, according to a new study. The research, conducted by 15 scientists from institutes around the world and organized by the IUCN Shark Specialist Group, focused on oceanic pelagic sharks and rays, including great white sharks, whale sharks, crocodile sharks, bigeye threshers, basking sharks, shortfin makos, longfin makos, salmon sharks, silky sharks, porbeagle sharks, oceanic whitetip sharks, blue sharks, manta rays, spinetail devilrays, giant devilrays and Chilean devilrays.  

The team determined that 16 out of the 21 oceanic shark and ray species that are caught in high seas fisheries are at heightened risk of extinction due primarily to targeted fishing for valuable fins and meat as well as indirect take in other fisheries.  In most cases, these catches are unregulated and unsustainable. The increasing demand for the delicacy "shark fin soup," driven by rapidly growing Asian economies, means that often the valuable shark fins are retained and the carcasses discarded.  This is the first study to determine the global threat status of 21 species of wide-ranging oceanic sharks and rays, said study leader Nicholas Dulvy of the Centre for Environment, Fishers and Aquaculture Science, Lowestoft Laboratory in the United Kingdom.

Interesting5: Scientists have found life about twice as far below the seafloor as has ever been documented before. A coring sample off the coast of Newfoundland turned up single-celled microbes living in searing temperatures about a mile (1,626 meters) below the seafloor. "These are probably not only the deepest, but the hottest organisms found in deep marine sediments," said R. John Parkes, a geobiologist at CardiffUniversity in Wales. "I was hoping we would find them this deep, so we were very excited that we actually did confirm they were present. It’s fascinating to know what proportion of our planet actually has living organisms in it."  

While life has been known to exist at even greater depths beneath land — such as bacteria found nearly two miles underground in a gold mine in South Africa — life under the sea had previously only been detected to depths of about half a mile (842 meters) below the seafloor.  Parkes and his colleagues analyzed core samples returned from the Ocean Drilling Program. They found evidence for prokaryotic cells, which lack a central nucleus, that appear to be from the archaea family, a sister domain to bacteria.