Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs / July 20-21, 2008

Aloha Paragraphs



Napili Bay, Maui
Photo Credit: Flickr.com

The trade winds will continue blowing across the islands through Monday. High pressure systems, the source of our trade winds, are now well established to the north of our islands. These winds are lighter now than they were during the past work week, as a surface trough has moved through the islands, slowing down the trade winds in the process. This lighter variety of trade winds will begin to pick up later Monday into Tuesday, becoming rather strong and gusty again by mid-week onward. The passage of a tropical vortex, the remains of former tropical cyclone Elida, as it passes to the south of the islands, will add to the gustiness of our local trade winds by mid-week.

Showers, brought in on the trade winds, will continue to arrive at times. The bulk of these showers have ended up falling along the windward coasts and slopes. The inversion layer is still higher than normal, destabilizing our local atmosphere somewhat…augmented by the passage of the surface trough of low pressure across the islands. This means that cloud tops have been allowed to grow vertically more than normal, enhancing the showers. This higher than normal inversion is allowing some showers to stretch over into the leeward sides at times, particularly on the smaller islands. Conditions should change towards the drier end of the precipitation spectrum over the next couple of days.

We may see another increase in showers arriving by Tuesday night into Wednesday, from moisture arriving from a retired tropical cyclone named Elida. Elida, which was a hurricane earlier in her life, recently lost its designation as a tropical cyclone, given its final warning by the National Hurricane Center in Miami. If you click on this looping satellite image, you will see what’s left of Elida, on the right hand side of the picture…as it spins westward. Looking further east, we see hurricane Fauso still churning the waters towards Mexico. Here is a current storm track map for Fausto…which poses no danger to the Hawaiian Islands.

~~~ It’s early Sunday evening here in Kula, Maui, as I begin updating this last section of today’s narrative. There continue to be more than the ordinary amount of clouds stretched across our island chain as we move into Sunday n ight, some of which consist of the locally rather thick high cirrus clouds. Some of the lower clouds have been dropping showers at times. Last evening I had a friend visit from Marin County, in northern California. We had a nice dinner of bbq’d Ahi, fresh picked salad out of the garden, and steamed Kula corn on the cob…followed by a slice of key lime cheese cake. We were invited over to the neighbors house afterwards, to watch some DVD’s of the old days. Three of us have been old friends since the 1970’s, as we all arrived here on Maui then. It was so much fun to see those old video’s, which were put in the DVD format! We all looked so young, as would be expected, but it’s so interesting to see yourself all those many years ago.

I’m about ready to go downstairs to cook dinner, actually prepare my dinners that will take me through the upcoming work week. I will make a simple red sauce pasta sauce this time, which I’ll grate a nice pecorino cheese on spaghetti each evening. The sky here in Kula is really cloudy, with light sprinkles of rain falling occasionally. I enjoy the cloud cover however, and the relatively cool air temperatures here in the upcountry area. I’ll be back very early Monday morning with your next new weather narrative from paradise, I hope you have a great Sunday night wherever you happen to be reading from! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Sunday evening/night music video – Zero 7…Somersault

Interesting:







The cacao bean is in danger. The Nature Conservation Research Council (NCRC) recently announced that in 20 years time, "Chocolate will be much like caviar today." So what’s the deal?  Unsustainable farming practices are to blame. Cacao typically grows in rainforest conditions with high biodiversity. Instead, farmers now clear the forest and use hybrid seeds to increase output over the short-term. Unfortunately, this leads to soil erosion and shorter lifespan of trees. Over time, this practice is predicted to lead to an overall shortage of cacao.

Most of the world’s cacao is grown in West Africa….even though Ghana is a net exporter of cacao, most of the country’s inhabitants could not afford to purchase a Cadbury or Hershey’s bar. For Ghanaians, "no chocolate 20 years from now" is now. Such reminders are necessary to place in perspective predictions of ecological change and impacts on human populations. While we, in wealthy, industrialized countries, may fear with trepidation the loss of resources and biodiversity associated with global warming, it is important to remember that half the world’s peoples are already living that reality.

Interesting2:

Did the tropics overheat during the Eocene some 55 to 34 million years ago? The answer holds the key to how our planet will respond to global warming, according to one climate researcher. The Earth went through a prolonged phase of extremely high temperatures during the Eocene, in which even the poles were ice-free.  However, there has always been some doubt about the temperatures of the tropics during this period. Most paleo-climate records show that the tropics had mean annual temperatures of 28 to 33°C, which is not much warmer than today. Recently, however, better calibrated data have suggested that ocean temperatures could have soared as high as 41°C (105.8F). If the tropics were indeed this hot, it would solve a huge problem faced by existing climate models, including those used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Existing models have difficulty duplicating climates in which the temperature gradient from the tropics to the poles is small, as suggested by the older paleo-climate data for the Eocene.

Interesting3: From Don Knotts’ portrayle of "Mr. Limpet" to the children’s favorite "Nemo" and the tuna-pitching character in the "Sorry, Charlie" commercials, we all have seen fish that can talk. But that’s just fiction, right? Well … Researchers say real fish can communicate with sound, too. And they say (the researchers, that is) that your speech skills and, in fact, all sound production in vertebrates can be traced back to this ability in fish. (You got your ears from fish, too.)  The new study was led by Andrew Bass (we did not make this up) of Cornell University. The scientists mapped developing brain cells in newly hatched midshipman fish larvae and compared them to those of other species.

They found that the chirp of a bird, the bark of a dog and all the other sounds that come out of animals’ mouths are the products of the neural circuitry likely laid down hundreds of millions of years ago with the hums and grunts of fish. "Fish have all the same parts of the brain that you do," Bass explained. His team traced the development of the connection from the midshipman fish’s vocal muscles to a cluster of neurons located in a compartment between the back of its brain and the front of its spinal cord. The same part of the brain in more complex vertebrates, such as humans, has a similar function, indicating that it was highly selected for during the course of evolution. The finding is published in the July 18 issue of the journal Science.

Interesting4:

If busy bars and blasting music seem to go hand in hand, new research from France suggests that might be because loud music encourages more drinking. The finding is reported in the October issue of Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, and is drawn from research led by Nicolas Gueguen, a professor of behavioral sciences at the Université de Bretagne-Sud in France. "This is an informative and good study that I think a lot of people will identify with, because it makes a lot of sense," said Dr. Marc Galanter, director of the division of alcoholism and drug abuse at the LangoneMedicalCenter at New York University. "Because it seems that loud music throws people off their game and renders them less in control of their capacity to moderate their drinking."

Galanter was not a part of the research team, which noted that prior explorations into the effect of music on drinking have already revealed that people spend more time in a bar that plays music than one that doesn’t, and that fast music in particular seems to prompt fast drinking. The style of music played in a bar can also affect drinking behavior, although in varying ways, depending on the cultural setting. In the current effort, the authors observed 40 male patrons between the ages of 18 and 25 while they visited one of two bars located in the western region of France. Both establishments were local hangouts for young people. The male participants — unaware that they were being tracked — were chosen for monitoring only if they were sitting at a table in pairs and had initially ordered an 8-ounce glass of draft beer.