Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs

Aloha Paragraphs



A perfect beach on Maui
Photo Credit: Flickr.com

The northeast trade winds will remain generally light Saturday…only to get even lighter again Sunday through Tuesday. Our local winds have been lighter than normal this week. High pressure systems to the north through northeast of the islands, will prompt our winds into the light to almost moderate now…considered more or less normal for this time of year. A trough moving through the islands Sunday through Tuesday, will slow our winds down again. The computer models are suggesting that by the middle of the new week ahead, our trade winds will increase again in strength, into the moderate levels…lasting through the remainder of the week.

Despite the continuing trade winds, our overlying atmosphere will remain rather dry and stable…limiting the showers that will fall along the windward sides of the islands.  After the leeward focus of showers the last several days, the bias for showers has shifted back to the windward sides now. As the trade winds diminish again Sunday through Tuesday, the showers will work their way back over to the leeward sides again during the afternoon hours…only to return again to the windward sides when the trade winds pick up starting next Wednesday.



~~~  As noted above, our trade winds will continue their unusual fluctuations in strength and direction. Generally, when we consider the trade winds during the summer here in the tropical latitudes of the Hawaiian Islands, we think in terms of easterly winds blowing in the more or less moderately strong realms. The later part of our spring season, and now right on into early Summer, hasn’t been normal in that regard. The trades, rather than being in a fairly steady state, have faltered in strength repeatedly…with more of that on tap through the next five days.

~~~ It’s early Friday evening here in Kihei, Maui, as I begin updating this last paragraph of today’s weather narrative from paradise. I just finished work, after a nice day in terms of weather here in Hawaii. I’m about ready to leave for Kahului, where I’ll see the new film called Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008)…I know that’s a weird name for a film, isn’t it! Hellboy II stars Ron Perlman, Selma Blair, among others. This is a film about the world’s roughest, toughest, reddest superhero, who is back in action to battle an unstoppable army of otherworldly creatures. I saw the original version of this film, and found myself adequately entertained, if not a bit more than that. I’m looking forward to sitting down in the theater, with a nice bag of unbuttered popcorn, and being once again swept away into a strange and different world! Here’s a trailer for this film, just in case you were curious what I’ll be sitting through. I’ll let you know what I thought early Saturday morning, before I leave for a surf session on the Lahaina side. I hope you have a great Friday night wherever you happen to be spending it! Aloha for now…Glenn.

A good song: Baby Come to Me…by James Ingram & Anita Baker – what voices!

Interesting: 

China has ordered dog meat to be taken off the menu at its 112 official Olympic restaurants in order to avoid offending foreign visitors. Restaurant workers are advised to "patiently" suggest other options to diners who order dog. Any restaurant found violating the ban would be black-listed, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported. Dog – known as "fragrant meat" – is eaten by some Chinese for purported medicinal properties. The ban, issued by the Beijing Catering Trade Association, forbids all designated Olympic restaurants from offering dog and urges other food outlets to remove the meat from menus.

"If a customer orders dog meat, restaurant staff should patiently suggest another entree," said Xiong Yumei, deputy director of the Beijing Tourism Bureau told Xinhua. The measure has been implemented to "respect the habits of many countries and nationalities," the Beijing News quoted the municipal food department as saying. The BBC’s James Reynolds says the ban is one of several steps taken by China to avoid foreign visitors being amused or offended by local customs. Authorities have also told people to queue up politely, to smile and not to spit on the streets. During the 1988 Seoul Olympics, South Korea also banned doggie dishes from menus. Officials invoked a law banning the sale of "foods deemed unsightly".

Interesting2: New evidence has emerged that a large plate of floating ice shelf attached to Antarctica is breaking up, in a troubling sign of global warming, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Thursday. Images taken by its Envisat remote-sensing satellite show that Wilkins Ice Shelf is "hanging by its last thread" to CharcotIsland, one of the plate’s key anchors to the Antarctic peninsula, ESA said in a press release. "Since the connection to the island… helps stabilise the ice shelf, it is likely the breakup of the bridge will put the remainder of the ice shelf at risk," it said. Wilkins Ice Shelf had been stable for most of the last century, covering around 16,000 square kilometres (6,000 square miles), or about the size of Northern Ireland, before it began to retreat in the 1990s. Since then several large areas have broken away, and two big breakoffs this year left only a narrow ice bridge about 2.7 kilometres (1.7 miles) wide to connect the shelf to Charcot and nearby LatadyIsland.

Interesting3: A long list of factors have been blamed for the global food crisis which along with the energy crisis has hit developing countries, and the poor in particular, hardest. Prices of staple foods have risen by up to 100 per cent. A growing population, changes in trade patterns, urbanization, dietary changes, biofuel production, climate change and regional droughts are all responsible, and commentators point to a classic pattern of price increases caused by high demand and low supply. But few mention the declining supply of water that is needed to grow irrigated and rain-fed crops. An often-mooted solution to the food crisis is to breed plants that produce the ultimate high-yielding, low water-consuming crops. While this is important, it will fail unless we also pay attention to where the water for all our food, fibre and energy crops is going to come from. Essentially, every calorie of food requires a litre of water to produce it. So those of us on Western diets use about 2,500-3,000 litres per day. The expected addition of a further 2.5 billion people to the world by 2030 will mean that we have to find over 2,000 more cubic kilometres of fresh water per year to feed them.

This is not any easy task, given that current water usage for food production is 7,500 cubic kilometres per year and supplies are already scarce. A few years ago, my organization, the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), demonstrated that many countries are facing severe water scarcity, either because insufficient fresh water is available or because they lack investment in water infrastructure, such as dams and reservoirs. What makes matters worse is that this scarcity predominantly affects developing countries where the majority of the world’s 840 million under-nourished people live. Serious and extremely worrying evidence indicates that water supplies are steadily being used up. And the causes of water scarcity are much the same as those of the food crisis: demand exceeds a finite supply. The world’s population is projected to grow from 6 billion to 8.5 billion by 2030 and unless we change the way we use water and increase water productivity — ie. produce more ‘crop per drop’ — we will not be able to feed them. That is the conclusion of the IWMI’s recent Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture and its book, Water for Food, Water for Life, which drew on the work of 700 scientists.

Interesting4: Like a tooth dipped in a glass of Coca-Cola, coral reefs, lobsters and other marine creatures that build calcified shells around themselves could soon dissolve as climate change turns the oceans increasingly acidic. The carbon dioxide spewed into the atmosphere by factories, cars and power plants is not just raising temperatures. It is also causing what scientists call "ocean acidification" as around 25 percent of the excess CO2 is absorbed by the seas. The threat to hard-bodied marine organisms, such as coral reefs already struggling with warming waters, is alarming, and possibly quite imminent, marine scientists gathered this week for a coral reef conference in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, said.  "The threshold for (corals) could be approached by the middle of this century … when they’ll reach a point where they may no longer be able to reproduce themselves as fast as they’re being destroyed," said Chris Langdon, am associate professor at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. "It’s not going to be instant. They’re not going to disappear that year. It may take another 50 or 100 years." It was only recently that scientists woke up to the fact that global warming would reduce the pH value of the oceans due to a chemical reaction of water with CO2. The pH scale is a measure of alkalinity or acidity, with 7 being neutral. The pH value of the oceans has been around 8.2 for hundreds of thousands of years, but since the start of the industrial age in 1800, it has dropped by 0.1.