Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs

Paradise on the island of Kauai
Photo Credit: flickr.com

As a late season cold front continues to dissipate to our northwest, a trade wind producing ridge of high pressure is pushing into the area northeast of the islands. This pressure configuration, as shown on local weather maps, is allowing the return of the trade winds. The trade winds arrived back over the Big Island Thursday, then rode up over the rest of the island chain during the day Friday. These cooling and refreshing trade winds will continue into the weekend and beyond, clearing the recent episode of voggy weather handily.

As the trade winds are now well established here in the islands, the majority of showers, carried in on these strengthening winds…will fall along the windward sides.  The overlying atmosphere is dry and stable now however, which will limit the extent, and intensity of those windward biased showers. The leeward sides will be sunny to partly cloudy during the days, with dry weather in the forecast. The Kona slopes may see a few upcountry showers during the afternoon hours, otherwise, pleasant weather will continue just about everywhere.

NOAA has now confirmed that the eastern and central north Pacific will see less than the normal amount of tropical cyclone activity during the upcoming 2008 hurricane season. This is good news, as no one wants to hear about an above normal amount of hurricanes prowling our surrounding waters! As I’m sure you’ve heard, and in contrast, the Atlantic Ocean is expecting more than the normal number of tropical storms and hurricanes this summer. Here in the central Pacific, where Hawaii is, we’re expecting just 3-4 tropical cyclones between June 1st and November 30th…our hurricane season. For context, a normal year would see 4-5 tropical cyclones plying the waters of our area of the Pacific.

We’re transitioned out of our recent light wind, vog producing, weather event Friday. The trade winds will ventilate our atmosphere now, bringing us back into a clear skied reality as we move into the weekend time frame. This long three day weekend, the Memorial Day holiday weekend, will have good weather here in the islands. I can’t think of any outdoor activity that will have weather related problems. It will be a time to get out there and enjoy Mother Nature here in the tropics.

~~~  I’m just getting ready to leave Kihei, Maui, to take the drive across the Central Valley, and then up the Haleakala Highway into the Upcountry area. I’m going to stop at the Pukalani Country Club, and try my hand at putting again. I have this little game I play at the putting green, that has six holes. The first time I played, it took me 15 putts to go around this little course… the second time I tried, I whittled it down to 14 putts. This evening, I’d like to make it in 13 putts if I can, at least that’s the goal I have set out for myself.

~~~ I’ll go home to Kula after that, have dinner, do some reading, and hit the hay fairly early. I getting up very early Saturday morning to do the updating on this website, have a quick breakfast, coffee, and hit the road towards Lahaina. I’ll have my surfboard on the car, and hope to find some nice little waves to ride over on that west side of the island. I’m not expecting to find much to ride, but it doesn’t take much to satisfy me. I’m going early so I can beat the trade winds, which bring choppy ocean conditions with them. The early birds get the smooth ocean conditions here in the islands.

~~~ I hope you have a great Friday night wherever you happen to be spending it! I’ll have the usual new weather narrative from paradise waiting for you here, at pretty much the same time you find it during a normal weekday, given my Saturday plans. Aloha for now…Glenn

Interesting: The U.S. Air Force operates the "world’s largest airline" and every $10-per-barrel increase in crude oil boosts its annual operating costs by $610 million, Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne said on Thursday. The Air Force’s bill for aviation fuel was about $6 billion in fiscal 2007, Wynne told a defense industry group. He declined to predict what the total would be for 2008.  U.S. crude oil futures soared to a record above $135 a barrel on Wednesday, more than double the price of one year ago. "We are very concerned about the instability in oil prices because it wreaks havoc on how we manage our flying-hour program across the Air Force, just as it is wreaking havoc on the pricing statistics for an airline," Wynne said. The jump in fuel prices has hammered the U.S. commercial airline industry, forcing seven small carriers to file for bankruptcy or to close their doors in the past five months. The Air Force spent just over $6 billion on fuel costs in fiscal 2006, more than double its costs in fiscal 2001, before the start of the war in Afghanistan. The Air Force, which has 19,000 pilots operating 5,700 aircraft and also flies unmanned aircrafts, has launched an ambitious drive to reduce its carbon dioxide output and reduce its reliance on foreign oil.

Interesting2: The US is always looking for ways of improving its seasonal hurricane forecasts and Amato Evan reckons he can help. He is testing a new forecasting tool, and the critical element is dust. Every year, large amounts of Saharan dust are blown off the West African coast and over the North Atlantic. There, they are thought to reflect solar radiation back out into space, cooling the temperature of the surface of the ocean. Given that the North Atlantic is the breeding ground for hurricanes that make landfall in the U and that their formation is triggered by warm sea-surface temperatures, Evan believes studying desert dust could improve the forecasts put out at the beginning of the hurricane season each May. Evan and his colleagues calculated the dust’s influence on sea-surface temperatures and hurricane strength by combining 25 years of satellite data showing the amount of dust suspended in the atmosphere with a conventional climate model. They estimate that about one-third of the increase in hurricanes intensity over the last 25 years is due to decreases in atmospheric dust load.

Interesting3: As Burma’s government finally allows foreign aid workers into the country, the UN is warning that only a few weeks remain before the country’s main rice crop, in the hard-hit Irrawaddy Delta, must be planted. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization says that the damage caused by Cyclone Nargis to the region’s irrigation canals and tidal defenses will have to be repaired before soils can start to recover from salt damage. So even if the next crop gets planted, it could yield less rice than usual. Nargis, which hit southern Burma on 2 May, is now thought to have killed 134,000 people and left 2.4 million homeless. The UN estimates that only a quarter of the victims have received any assistance. There are reports of cholera among survivors, who have little or no shelter or clean water. Foreign aid workers, and ordinary Burmese trying to bring help from elsewhere in the country, have been banned from going deep into the delta region. It was not immediately clear whether Friday’s announcement, made by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon after a meeting with the junta’s chief, General Than Shwe, meant foreign aid workers would be able to enter the delta, or when.

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.