Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs / July 15-16, 2008

Aloha Paragraphs



The windward side of Oahu
Photo Credit: Flickr.com

The recent lighter than normal trade winds will give way to increasingly strong trade winds through the rest of the week. A trough of low pressure, located to the north through northwest of Hawaii Tuesday evening…have kept our local winds from attaining their full strength so far this week. As we move into Wednesday, the trough will be getting further away, far enough to limit the influence our local trade winds. The second half of the week, and especially by the weekend, our trade winds will be noticeably stronger. We may end up having small craft advisory flags going up in those windiest spots by Friday or Saturday. These trade winds will continue on into next week, and likely through the rest of the month.

The bias for showers has been over the leeward areas with the recent light winds…but will shift back to the windward sides with the strengthening trade winds. We saw a relatively clear morning give way to afternoon clouds Tuesday. These cumulus clouds spilled a few more showers along the leeward slopes, but not as many as the previous several days. The showers will move back to the windward sides soon, with the chance that they may increase later Friday into the weekend, which would be a great thing…due to the dry to very dry conditions that currently exist.

~~~ Its early Tuesday evening here in Kihei, Maui, as I begin updating this last section of today’s narrative. It seemed as though we saw the beginning of a stronger trade wind flow starting this afternoon. The winds didn’t get too strong, but nonetheless, they were enough it appears, that it interrupted the strong convective cumulus cloud buildups over the leewards slopes. When I went to lunch today, actually on the way back to work, my car thermometer, which measures the outside temperature, read 91F degrees…which is hot for here in the tropics. By the way, the hottest temperature ever recorded here in the islands was 100F degrees on the Big Island. Some of the hottest days during the height of summer, will attain the middle 90F’s, which is actually quite rare. At any rate, the trade winds will be gaining a stronger toe hold here in Hawaii now, which will bring their cooling relief from the heat soon. Those trade winds will bring some showers to the windward sides, especially by this weekend. I’ll be back very early Wednesday morning with your next new weather narrative from paradise. I hope you have a great Tuesday night until then! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting:  The Chinese government has successfully cleared tons of algae that was blocking the Olympic sailing course in the eastern city of Qingdao.  A special protection zone was set up using a boom and netting. But in other areas the thick bright green algae is still polluting the beaches. The Chinese government had set a goal of clearing the sailing area by Tuesday. The Olympic Games begin on 8 August. The water at the Olympic sailing course in Qingdao is now largely algae free. Some 10,000 troops from the People’s Liberation Army have lifted over half a million tonnes of the thick heavy weed from the coastline. A boom and netting is stopping more of the algae coming ashore. Olympic sailing teams here say they can now train and will be able to compete in Qingdao‘s waters. But at beaches not protected by the boom, the algae is still coming in. China says it is a naturally occurring, though rare, phenomenon. Environmentalists blame pollution.

Interesting2: 

Two hundred thousand boats sat idle in Japan, as fishermen across the nation took to the streets on Tuesday to protest skyrocketing fuel prices.  The strike — the first ever by the country’s fishermen — hopes to convince the government that without its intervention, rising fuel costs will kill the fishermen’s businesses. Across Japan‘s fishing ports, fishermen simultaneously blew their whistles in a symbol of solidarity, and operations ground to a halt. Thousands of others rallied in downtown Tokyo, marching in circles around the fisheries ministry and chanting, "We’re dying," through bullhorns. The protesting fishing unions say fuel once accounted for 10 percent of a business’ operating cost. It now accounts for 30 to 50 percent.

They want the government to provide subsidies to make up for the price hike. The demonstration was the latest in a wave of protests around the world over fuel prices. Masatoshi Wakabayashi, the minister of agriculture, forestry and fisheries, told reporters Tuesday morning that he "understands the frustration of the fishermen." He urged reforms within the fishing industry to decrease its reliance on oil, adding it would be "difficult to compensate them for the hike in the price of oil." The deep-sea tuna fishermen’s association told CNN it might suspend operations for two to three months later this year, due to fuel price hike. Marine life has long been a staple food source in Japan.

Interesting3: Rock Port, Mo., has an unusual crop: wind turbines. The four turbines that supply electricity to the small town of 1,300 residents make it the first community in the United States to operate solely on wind power. "That's something to be very proud of, especially in a rural area like this — that we're doing our part for the environment," said Jim Crawford, a natural resource engineer at the University of Missouri Extension in Columbia. A map published by the U.S. Department of Energy indicates that northwest Missouri has the state's highest concentrations of wind resources and contains a number of locations that are potentially suitable for utility-scale wind development. The four turbines that power RockPort are part of a larger set of 75 turbines across three counties that are used to harvest the power of wind.

"We're farming the wind, which is something that we have up here," Crawford said. "The payback on a per-acre basis is generally quite good when compared to a lot of other crops, and it's as simple as getting a cup of coffee and watching the blades spin." And the turbines have another benefit besides produces clean energy: MU Extension specialists said that the Missouri wind farms will bring in more than $1.1 million annually in county real estate taxes, to be paid by Wind Capital Group, a wind energy developer based in St. Louis. "This is a unique situation because in rural areas it is quite uncommon to have this increase in taxation revenues," said Jerry Baker, and MU Extension community development specialist.

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.