Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs

  Spectacular sunset in Hawaii
Photo Credit: Flickr.com

The trade winds will be taking a tumble in strength, becoming lighter as we move into the weekend. Most areas around the state saw light to moderately strong trade winds blowing Thursday…which will become lighter Friday into the weekend. The small craft wind advisory, which was active for the last week or so, has now been dropped across all Hawaiian waters. The computer models are strengthening our local trade winds again by the middle of next week…developing back into the light to moderately strong range then.

We will see at least some increase in showers falling at times now, into the weekend. The majority of whatever passing showers that arrive, will end up along the windward sides for the time being, although if the winds get as light as expected…we may see afternoon convective showers over the leeward sides with time too. This increase in showers won’t come in buckets, but there definitely looks like at least more showers than we’ve seen since last weekend. 

As this looping satellite image shows, we have an area of high cirrus clouds moving over the state. Those cirrus clouds are showing up as bright and white, carried along from west to east in the upper winds aloft. Those high flying clouds arrived during the day Thursday, just in time to provide a nice sunset…which should set the stage for a colorful sunrise again Friday. At the same time, we see lots of clouds marching our way at the lower levels of the atmosphere…carried in on the trade winds.

Pressure patterns in the central Pacific are shifting around some now, with the net result being lighter trade winds for the next several days. We still have a high pressure ridge well established to our north, which is the source of our local winds now. This ridge however will be migrating southward some, which is why our winds will be getting somewhat softer, especially as we get into the weekend time frame. This time of year, when the trade winds falter like this, we find ourselves in an increasingly muggy environment.

As this somewhat more sultry reality settles in over us, we may see the bias for showers breaking away from the windward sides…moving over into the upcountry inland areas. It will depend on just how light the trade winds become. If they get lighter than expected, that would add weight for the interior showers to develop. If on the other hand, the trade winds continue to hold their own, then whatever showers that are around, would occur more so along the windward coasts and slopes.  

~~~ Thursday was another nice day here in the islands! As mentioned one of the paragraphs above, high cirrus clouds have arrived over island skies…along with a few lower level clouds too. The winds stayed a bit stronger than anticipated, but are expected to begin their more pronounced slow down beginning Friday. This unusual softening of the trade winds will extend into the first couple of days of next week. At the same time, as that satellite image, a couple of paragraphs up the page show, we have some added moisture headed our way from the east, which hopefully will bring at least some measure of increasing shower activity. I’m heading home to Kula now, and hope to arrive in time to witness the nice sunset that should occur this evening. I’ll be back very early again on Friday morning however, with your next new weather narrative from paradise. I hope you have a great Thursday night wherever you happen to be spending it! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting: The true impact of an asteroid or comet crashing near the Chesapeake Bay 35 million years ago has been examined in detail for the first time. The analysis reveals the resilience of life in the aftermath of disaster. The impact crater, which is buried under 400 to 1,200 feet (120 to 365 meters) of sand, silt and clay, spans twice the length of Manhattan. The sprawling depression helped create what would eventually become Chesapeake Bay. About 10,000 years ago, ice sheets began to melt and once-dry river valleys filled with water. The rivers of the Chesapeake region converged directly over the buried crater, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Gregory Gohn of the USGS and his colleagues analyzed samples from two deep holes drilled into the crater near its center.  

"I think what we wanted to do is drill into the central part of the crater and get as long of a section as we could and understand the processes that put them in the order we found them," Gohn told SPACE.com. Within seconds of the object’s touchdown, rocks were flung high into the air.  The force of the impact carved a colossal cavity and caused temperatures to skyrocket, turning brittle rocks into taffy. Then, material along the cavity’s rim surged downhill into the bowl-shaped depression like an avalanche.  The extreme heat, the researchers say, killed off most life. However, they found abundant microbes living today in the deepest parts of the crater. Some of the ancient bacteria would have survived the impact, the researchers say, because their little hideouts didn’t feel the brunt of the heat. The rest of the abundant and newly discovered microbial life is thought to have recolonized the zapped area possibly tens of thousands of years following the impact when temperatures dropped to habitable levels.

Interesting2: Some scientists believe that at least one meteorite found in Antarctica preserves evidence of ancient life on Mars. Now, work by a team of English scientists reinforces an earlier suggestion that evidence of life on the early Earth might be found in meteorites on the moon. The original idea was presented in a 2002 paper by University of Washington astronomer John Armstrong, who suggested that material ejected from Earth during the Late Heavy Bombardment (a period about four billion years ago when the Earth was subjected to a rain of asteroids and comets) might be found on the moon. Armstrong’s suggestion was interesting, but whether a meteor ejected from the Earth might arrive intact on the moon remained an open question.

New research by a team under Ian Crawford and Emily Baldwin of the Birkbeck College School of Earth Sciences used more sophisticated means to simulate the pressures any such terrestrial meteorites might have experienced during their arrival on the lunar surface. This confirmed Armstrong’s hypothesis. In many cases, the pressures could be low enough to permit the survival of biological markers, making the lunar surface a good place to look for evidence of early terrestrial life. Any such markers are unlikely to remain on Earth, where they would have been erased long ago by more than three billion years of volcanic activity, later meteor impacts, or simple erosion by wind and rain.

Interesting3: A billion acres of farmland around the world have been abandoned and could now be used to grow biofuel crops, a new study suggests. One of the criticisms of biofuels such as ethanol from corn or rice is that the crops eat into land that could be used to grow food, which is increasingly in short supply globally, causing frustration and hunger that have led to protests and riots. The alternative of clearing forests to grow biofuel crops is unacceptable to many. Yet somewhere between 1 billion and 1.2 billion acres of agricultural land is lying fallow, the study finds. That compares to about 3.8 billion acres that are currently in use. The researchers caution, however, that biofuels will be no magic bullet to resolving possible energy crises in the future.

"Our results showed that if you used all these abandoned agricultural lands, you might obtain up to 8 percent of current energy needs," said Elliott Campbell, a postdoctoral fellow in biology at StanfordUniversity and lead author of the report. "So this result is basically showing us that biofuels could be a meaningful, but a small portion of our total energy future." The study, based on satellite imagery and historical maps, is detailed today in the online edition of the journal Environmental Science &Technology. It was funded by the Carnegie Institution and the Global Climate and Energy Project at Stanford.