Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs / July 14-15, 2008

Aloha Paragraphs



Palm tree swaying in the light trade winds
Photo Credit: Flickr.com

An usual spell of lighter than normal trade winds will remain in place through the first several days of this new week. A trough of low pressure, moving by to the north of Hawaii…is keeping our local winds from attaining their full strength for the time being. The computer models forecast it will take until mid-week or Thursday, before our trade winds start to increase again in strength, becoming stronger during the second half of the week. 

The atmosphere over our islands is rather dry and stable, helping to limit shower production, although not completely. Despite the trough of low pressure moving by to our north, there won’t be many an excessive amount of showers falling. Whatever few showers that do fall, will occur along the windward coasts and slopes, during the nights and early mornings. There will be a few convective showers that occur along the leeward slopes too, during the afternoon into the early evening hours…which may turn out to be heavier than elsewhere.

~~~ It’s early Monday evening here in Kihei, Maui, as I begin updating this last section of today’s weather narrative. Skies started off in a mostly clear way Monday morning, after a few overnight windward biased showers. As the day wore on however, aided by the daytime heating, and the light winds, clouds increased greatly during the afternoon hours. Those convective cumulus clouds let loose with some generous showers locally, most noteworthy of which occurred in the upcountry areas of Maui. The NWS forecast office in Honolulu issued a flood advisory along the southwest flank of the Haleakala Crater, near Ulupalakua…with showers eventually working their way down towards the coasts near Makena and Wailea. Clouds will decrease steadily after sunset, with another clear morning for Tuesday. As the weather ingredients will remain in place, we can look for another repeat performance, with afternoon cloud buildups locally Tuesday…leading to showers here and there. I’ll be back very early Tuesday morning with a brand new weather narrative for you, I hope you have a great Monday night until then! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting: Starting next year, the Rolls-Royce Group and British Airways hope to test up to four airplane fuel alternatives to kerosene. The companies are asking suppliers to provide fuel samples for testing in 2009. The companies are seeking fuels that perform as well as kerosene but emit fewer greenhouse gases. They are also taking into account if production of the fuels will have detrimental effects on food supplies, land use and water. Suppliers will also need to ensure the fuels can be mass-produced and distributed around the world. The fuels will be tested on a Rolls-Royce RB211 engine from a British Airways Boeing 747 at an indoor test engine bed. The companies aren’t experimenting on actual flights so that outside factors will not affect performance and emissions. Results will be compared to that of an engine running on kerosene, and the tests will include performance while idling, accelerating, taking off and cruising.

Testing will finish by March 2009. The Federal Aviation Administration and the X Prize Foundation have also teamed up to spur innovation and investment in greener alternatives to jet fuel. The X Prize Foundation will spend the next 14 months working with aviation experts and identify incentives for the creation of alternative fuels and technologies. Once finalized, the alternative fuel competition is expected to run three-eight years. The competition will also look for fuels that are renewable, not based on fossil fuels, and which do not affect food production or land changes that lead to increases in greenhouse gas emissions. Current and former X Prize awards range from $10 million to $30 million. The FAA’s partnership with the X Prize Foundation is an outgrowth of its Next Generation air traffic modernization program aimed at doubling the capacity of the U.S. aviation system by 2025, a goal that includes the development and use of renewable fuels.

Interesting2: Booming demand for food, fuel and wood as the world’s population surges from six to nine billion will put unprecedented and unsustainable demand on the world’s remaining forests, two new reports said on Monday. The reports from the U.S.-based Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) said this massive potential leap in deforestation could add to global warming and put pressure on indigenous forest dwellers that could lead to conflict.  "Arguably we are on the verge of the last great global land grab," said Andy White, co-author of "Seeing People Through the Trees," one of the two reports. "Unless steps are taken, traditional forest owners, and the forests themselves, will be the big losers. It will mean more deforestation, more conflict, more carbon emissions, more climate change and less prosperity for everyone."

RRI is a global coalition of environmental and conservation non-government organizations with a particular focus on forest protection and management and the rights of forest peoples. White’s report said that unless agricultural productivity rises sharply, new land equivalent in size to 12 Germanys will have to be cultivated for crops to meet food and biofuel demand by 2030. Virtually all of it is likely to be in developing countries, principally land that is currently forested. The second report, "From Exclusion to Ownership", noted that governments still claim ownership of most forests in developing countries, but said they had done little to ensure the rights and tenure of forest dwellers. It said people whose main source of livelihood is the forests were usually the best custodians of the forests and their biodiversity.

Interesting3: The trend of more frequent global natural disasters continues, due to an onslaught of weather-related crises in the first half of 2008.  The total number of disasters as of June 30, 2008 already exceeds the average number of disasters recorded at mid-year over the past decade. Although 2008 is not on pace to eclipse 2007 as registering the most natural disasters ever, an especially active Atlantic hurricane season is expected. During the first half of each year between 1998 and 2007, the average number of disasters recorded was 380. So far in 2008, 400 disasters have been reported, according to data released last week by Munich Re, a German reinsurance group. The data covers geological events, such as earthquakes and volcanoes, as well as weather-related disasters like storms, floods, and heat waves.  

Based on the mid-year report, 2008 is following the steady rise in natural disasters that Munich Re has tracked since 1980. The average number of disasters throughout the 1980s was 400. It increased to 630 in the 1990s and to 730 in the past ten years. The highest recorded number of natural disasters, 960, occurred in 2007, Munich Re reported. So far this year, tornadoes, severe thunderstorms, and massive flooding have crippled the American Midwest. An earthquake in China‘s Sichuan province killed more than 69,000 people and caused an estimated $20 billion in damages. Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar killed at least 84,000 people and left at least $10 billion in damages. The majority of this year’s disasters, 80 percent, are classified as severe thunderstorms, Munich Re says.

Interesting4: A good-sized asteroid sailing past our planet right now turns out to be two giant rocks doing a celestial jig. The setup, catalogued as 2008 BT18, was thought to be nearly a half-mile wide after its discovery by MIT’s LINEAR search program in January. Nothing else was known about it. Now seen as two objects orbiting each other, the pair will be closest to Earth on July 14, at about 1.4 million miles (2 million kilometers) away. That’s nearly six times as far from us as the moon. It will not strike the planet. But scientists want to learn more about binary asteroids because one day they might find one headed our way.

Deflecting a binary off course could be considerably more challenging that altering the path of a single rock. Radar observations from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico on July 6 and 7 "clearly show two objects," said Lance Benner of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The objects are estimated to be 1,970 feet (600 meters) and 650 feet (200 meters) in diameter. The larger one rotates upon its axis in 3 hours or less. Additional observations from NASA’s Goldstone radar in the Mojave Desert in California are expected to reveal more about the density, shapes and orbit of the pair.

Interesting5: Hurricane seasons have been getting longer over the past century and the big storms are coming earlier. The trend has been particularly noticeable since 1995, some climate scientists say. Further, the area of warm water able to support hurricanes is growing larger over time. The Atlantic Ocean is becoming more hurricane friendly, scientists say, and the shift is likely due to global warming. "There has been an increase in the seasonal length over the last century," Jay Gulledge, a senior scientist with the PewCenter on Global Climate Change, told LiveScience. "It’s pretty striking." A study Gulledge co-authored with other climate scientists found a five-day increase in season length per decade since 1915. Hurricane season officially starts June 1, but the first named storm of the 2008 season, Tropical Storm Albert, formed on May 31.

The first hurricane of the season, Hurricane Bertha, formed on July 1, reaching hurricane strength on July 7, relatively early in the season for a major storm. In the last decade, more strong storms have been forming earlier in the season, said hurricane researcher Greg Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. While this trend hasn’t been formally linked to global warming because climate models can’t reproduce individual storms, Holland thinks it’s likely that the warming caused by manmade greenhouse gases is a major factor in the seasonal shift based on observations of changes in recent decades and the predictions models are making for the changing conditions in the Atlantic basin. The length of the hurricane season is "one of the potentially big signals" that could change in response to global warming, Holland said.

Interesting6: Sailors and scientists have been mapping ocean currents for centuries, but it turns out they’ve missed something big. How big? The entire ocean is striped with 100-mile-wide bands of slow-moving water that extend right down to the seafloor, according to a recent study. Nikolai A. Maximenko of the University of Hawaii at Manoa and colleagues developed a precise new method for measuring the topography of the ocean surface by combining data from satellites and from the movements of more than 10,000 drifting oceanographic buoys. In doing so, the team generated detailed maps, in which they first noticed the peculiar striations. Some scientists initially dismissed the stripes as statistical artifacts, but Maximenko’s team dug deeper, looking for a similar pattern in water temperature measurements from two test areas in the Pacific.

Indeed, though barely detectable, the striated currents are real. They flow past each other in opposing directions at 130 feet per hour—just one-tenth to one-hundredth the speed of major ocean currents—and subtle changes in temperature demarcate their boundaries. Maximenko says a new computer model has corroborated some features of the observed striations, but his team is still mystified by their orientation, location, and strength. The discovery is important, he says, because even weak currents can have large effects on global climate and on the flow of food and creatures in the oceans.