Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs / August 1-2, 2008

Aloha Paragraphs



  Snorkeling on the south shore of Maui
Photo Credit: flickr.com

An upper level trough of low pressure to the north of Hawaii, will cause our local trade winds to slack off in strength through the next several days.  At the same time, the long lasting trade wind producing high pressure system to our north, moves away from our islands. The combination of both influences will have our wind speeds becoming noticeably lighter over the next few days. The trade winds will likely become soft enough, in some leeward coastal areas, that we will feel rather sultry at times.







As we move into the early part of next week, our local winds will increase in strength again, bringing us back into another long lasting, fair weather, trade wind weather pattern through the rest of the week. 

The instability induced by the upper level trough of low pressure, will prompt some locally heavy leeward biased showers during the afternoon hours. Satellite imagery shows hardly any shower bearing clouds upstream of the islands, so that we can look for generally dry weather through Saturday along the windward sides in contrast. The leftover showery clouds from former eastern Pacific tropical cyclone Genevieve, will bring some increase in showers later this weekend into Monday. As the trade winds return early next week, we’ll find the return of a normal amount of passing showers along the windward sides, with generally sunny and dry conditions prevailing over the leeward beaches.

It’s early Friday evening here in Kihei, Maui, as I start updating this last section of today’s narrative. Many areas around the state will remain dry into the weekend. Looking at this satellite image, we see very few clouds moving in our direction on the lighter trade winds…which have down shifted into a lower gear now. We did see locally heavy showers break out over the leeward sides Friday afternoon however, which could return Saturday afternoon as well. 

~~~  Despite the lack of moisture around Friday morning, things changed rather drastically during the afternoon hours. We saw the mostly sunny skies of the morning, become locally very cloudy…aided by the daytime heating of the islands, especially on the leeward sides. I was quite honestly surprised how many showers there were, and how locally heavy they became as well. The windward sides in contrast remained quite clear and dry. I would expect a repeat performance Saturday, although by Saturday night or Sunday, we should see the leading edge of whatever showers that old Genevieve has for us…arriving along the windward sides.

~~~ I’m about ready to leave Kihei, for the drive over to Kahului, where I’ll finally be seeing the new film The Dark Knight (2008). This highly rated film stars Christian Bale, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Heath Ledger (who is now deceased), Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, and Morgan Freeman, among others. This film is being described as an action adventure, with crime and gangster elements. In a nutshell, the Caped Crusader (Batman) returns, protecting Gotham City from the mad criminal mastermind, The Joker. I have been so much looking forward to seeing this film, but have held back, giving the crowds time to thin out. I’m hoping there will be a seat in the theater for this Maui weatherman. Here’s a trailer for this much talked about film. Many of my friends have been giving an A+ rating, so I’ll look forward to giving you my honest impression of this film early Saturday morning, when I’ll be here again with your next new weather narrative from paradise. I hope you have a great Friday night until then! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting:

African elephants are being slaughtered for their ivory at a pace unseen since an international ban on the ivory trade took effect in 1989. But the public outcry that resulted in that ban is absent today, and a University of Washington conservation biologist contends it is because the public seems to be unaware of the giant mammals’ plight. The elephant death rate from poaching throughout Africa is about 8 percent a year based on recent studies, which is actually higher than the 7.4 percent annual death rate that led to the international ivory trade ban nearly 20 years ago, said Samuel Wasser, a UW biology professor. But the poaching death rate in the late 1980s was based on a population that numbered more than 1 million. Today the total African elephant population is less than 470,000.

"If the trend continues, there won’t be any elephants except in fenced areas with a lot of enforcement to protect them," said Wasser. He is lead author of a paper in the August issue of Conservation Biology that contends elephants are on a course that could mean most remaining large groups will be extinct by 2020 unless renewed public pressure brings about heightened enforcement. Co-authors are William Clark of the Interpol Working Group on Wildlife Crime and the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, Ofir Drori of the Last Great Ape Organization in Cameroon, Emily Kisamo of the Lusaka Agreement Task Force in Kenya, Celia Mailand of the UW, Benezeth Mutayoba of SokoineUniversity in Tanzania and Matthew Stephens of the University of Chicago. Wasser’s laboratory has developed DNA tools that can determine which elephant population ivory came from. That is important because often poachers attack elephants in one country but ship the contraband ivory from an adjacent nation to throw off law enforcement.

Interesting2:

Geoscientists have long presumed that, like today, the tropics remained warm throughout Earth’s last major glaciation 300 million years ago. New evidence, however, indicates that cold temperatures in fact episodically gripped these equatorial latitudes at that time. Geologist Gerilyn Soreghan of Oklahoma University found evidence for this conclusion in the preservation of an ancient glacial landscape in the Rocky Mountains of western Colorado. Three hundred million years ago, the region was part of the tropics. The continents then were assembled into the supercontinent Pangaea. Soreghan and colleagues published their results in the August 2008, issue of the journal Geology.

Climate model simulations are unable to replicate such cold tropical conditions for this time period, said Soreghan. "We are left with the prospect that what has been termed our ‘best-known’ analogue to Earth’s modern glaciation is in fact poorly known." "This study is an example of the wealth of untapped climate information stored in Earth’s ‘deep time’ geologic record millions of years ago," said H. Richard Lane, program director in NSF’s Division of Earth Sciences, which funded the research. "These kinds of discoveries may greatly improve our understanding and prediction of modern climate change."

Interesting3:

Airbus’s A380 superjumbo touched down at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport on Friday, marking the first commercial arrival of the giant, double-decker passenger plane on U.S. soil. The Emirates aircraft, carrying 489 passengers, landed smoothly and on time after a 12-1/2 hour flight from Dubai. The Gulf-based carrier, owned by the government of Dubai, is the second airline to put the A380 into service, following Singapore Airlines , which started A380 flights to Sydney in October. The plane, costing $327 million at list prices, did visit New York and Los Angeles in March last year for route-testing purposes, but Friday’s flight was the first regularly scheduled arrival of an A380 in the United States. With its huge capacity and relatively fuel-efficient engines, airlines hope the world’s biggest passenger jet will be the most cost-effective way of serving high-volume routes linking big cities, especially in light of soaring oil prices.