Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs

  Big full moon rising!
Artist Credit: James Coleman

We’re moving into a solid trade wind weather pattern here in Hawaii now. These trade winds are expected to become stronger through the rest of the week, with small craft wind advisories having gone up in those windiest locations in the southern part of the state Wednesday afternoon. There doesn’t appear to be any end in sight for this extended period of trades, which is normal for this time in the month of June.

These gusty trade winds will carry clouds in our direction, although no heavy showers are indicated. Showers will fall generally along the windward sides…although the Kona slopes could see a few afternoon showers too. There are no rainfall enhancing weather systems on our horizon at this time. This isn’t particularly good news however, as we’re a bit dry going into the summer months.

~~~ As can be seen on this looping satellite image, there are still lots of clouds associated with the trough to our west, which is spinning in a counterclockwise fashion near the International Dateline. Meanwhile, to the south, we see a streaky area of high cirrus clouds. They are mostly staying to the south of the Big Island Wednesday evening, but the northern fringe at times pushes up over the Big Island and the islands of Maui County.

~~~ It’s early Wednesday evening, here in Kula, Maui, as I start writing this last paragraph of today’s narrative. It was another nice day here in paradise, with loads of sunshine beaming down, especially along the leeward beaches. The windward sides are finding some increase in clouds and showers, and although they aren’t heavy ones…at this point we need every drop of water that falls from the sky! Speaking of beaming down, June’s full moon will be at the height of its glory tonight! I trust that everyone will have the opportunity, or make it for themselves…to step outside and check it out! I’ll be back very early Thursday morning with your next new weather narrative. I hope you have a bright Wednesday night wherever you happen to be reading from! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting:

With oil prices near $140 a barrel, motorists are starting to look seriously at both alternative fuels and electric vehicles as a way to be able to keep driving their cars. But experts say it will take five to 10 years for these alternatives to take root, given the capacity challenge for an auto industry that is adding 65 million new cars a year to a fleet of 1 billion. In the meantime, car and parts makers, oil companies and even electricity generators are left guessing which way motorists will turn and what technology will win. "We don’t know at the moment whether it’s battery-based electricity technology or sustainable biofuels that will be successful," said James Smith, chairman of Shell UK Ltd, speaking at a climate change seminar hosted by Reuters. "The strategic issues confronting us are very significant." A range of options will emerge as motorists pick between "plug-in" electric cars, longer-range gasoline-electric "hybrids," or simply downsized, more efficient gasoline and diesel models, and as governments, worried by global warming and energy security, give more or less support for biofuels.

Hybrid vehicles, which have both a conventional internal combustion engine and electric motor and battery, are already popular. Toyota Motor Corp has sold 1.5 million Prius hybrids since 1997 and it wants hybrids to reach one tenth of its total sales by 2011. In a hybrid, the electric battery and motor aid stop-start city driving, while the gasoline engine allows longer trips, together cutting energy use and carbon emissions. Hybrids accounted for 3 percent of U.S. car sales in 2007. Makers absorb most of the extra $5,000 engine cost, leaving the street price only $1000 to $2000 higher. Hybrids could be "broadly present" in the auto industry in five years, said Vlatko Vlatkovic, head of electrification research at GE, which has much to gain from widespread electrification of road transport.

Interesting2: The list of countries on the brink of disaster because of the global food crisis is growing by the week. Terrorism and security experts predict widespread social and political unrest and violent conflict in the second and third world. Last week the United Nations’ World Food Program announced it is to provide U.S. $1.2 billion (£600 million) in additional food aid in the 62 countries hit hardest by the food and fuel crisis. And Save the Children Sunday launched an emergency appeal to help children in Ethiopia who are suffering from increasing levels of hunger. The charity said a combination of drought and escalating food prices has left 4.6 million people urgently in need of food. In scenes reminiscent of the famines of the 1980s, about 736,000 of these are children under the age of five, a group which is particularly vulnerable to the effects of malnutrition.

More so than terrorism or global warming, food security will become so critical it will change global governance and result in civil unrest and food wars. “It is clear which countries are going to be at risk,” Graham Hutchings of Oxford Analytica Daily Brief, which provides country-specific daily risk analysis to political leaders, academics, businesses and NGOs, told the Sunday Herald. “Those who are net importers of food and those with weak governments will fall, in all likelihood. The overthrow of the leader in Haiti in April over food prices is the shape of things to come. “Those which have come across our radar are Cambodia, parts of India, the Philippines, central Asian countries such as Uzbekistan and Tajikistan and African countries such as Senegal, Cameroon, Burkina Faso and the Ivory Coast. There have been food riots in Egypt, Yemen and Malaysia.”

Interesting3:

Many a professor dreams of revolution. But Norman T. Uphoff, working in a leafy corner of the Cornell University  campus, is leading an inconspicuous one centered on solving the global food crisis. The secret, he says, is a new way of growing rice. Rejecting old customs as well as the modern reliance on genetic engineering, Dr. Uphoff, 67, an emeritus professor of government and international agriculture with a trim white beard and a tidy office, advocates a management revolt.  Harvests typically double, he says, if farmers plant early, give seedlings more room to grow and stop flooding fields. That cuts water and seed costs while promoting root and leaf growth.

The method, called the System of Rice Intensification, or S.R.I., emphasizes the quality of individual plants over the quantity. It applies a less-is-more ethic to rice cultivation. In a decade, it has gone from obscure theory to global trend – and encountered fierce resistance from established rice scientists. Yet a million rice farmers have adopted the system, Dr. Uphoff says. The rural army, he predicts, will swell to 10 million farmers in the next few years, increasing rice harvests, filling empty bellies and saving untold lives. "The world has lots and lots of problems," Dr. Uphoff said recently while talking of rice intensification and his 38 years at Cornell. "But if we can’t solve the problems of peoples’ food needs, we can’t do anything. This, at least, is within our reach."

Interesting4: 

Placing solar panels in space above both night and clouds was first considered 40 years ago. But the estimated cost was, in a word, astronomical. The idea, however, has seen a resurgence, thanks to rising oil prices and advances in solar technology. A report from U.S. Defense Department found that space-based solar is technically feasible and economically viable.  To help prove the point, the Air Force Academy recently announced plans for a small demonstration satellite that would beam down a meager, but still significant, 0.1 watts of solar power.  "Our vision is to build the world’s first-ever space-based solar power system to light a single bulb on Earth and in so doing light the path for business to follow," said Col. Michael "Coyote" Smith of the Air Force.

The type of transmission beam is still not decided, but the project may benefit from separate research in Japan that has been studying the two most likely technologies: microwaves and lasers. The sun puts out more than 10 trillion times the energy currently being consumed by the whole world. "We would only need to tap into a small fraction of that to get all our energy now and in many years to come," said Mark Hopkins, senior vice president of the National Space Society, which recently formed an alliance with other non-profits to promote space-based solar.  The advantage of going to space is that sunlight is constant up there and three to 13 times stronger than the average down here on Earth, Smith said.

Interesting5:

How clouds respond to global warming poses a huge challenge for climate scientists, since clouds are far more changeable in real life than models can predict. However, experts do agree that the level of future global warming greatly depends on clouds. A new study finds that natural variations in how clouds form could actually be causing temperature changes, rather than the other way around, and could also lead to overestimates of how sensitive the Earth’s climate is to greenhouse gas emissions. "Since the cloud changes could conceivably be caused by known long-term modes of climate variability, such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, or El Niño and La Niña, some, or even most, of the global warming seen in the last century could simply be due to natural fluctuations in the climate system," says lead author Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama-Huntsville.

Spencer and his co-author William Braswell point out that the paper doesn’t disprove the theory that humans are causing global warming. Instead, they report that "it offers an alternative explanation for what we see in the climate system which has the potential for greatly reducing estimates of mankind’s impact on Earth’s climate." "But we really won’t know until much more work is done," he added. In addition to this article, Spencer has published several others that question the scientific consensus about climate change, which states that human-produced greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide are causing global warming.