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

August 20-21 2008

Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Wednesday afternoon: 

Lihue, Kauai – 86
Honolulu, Oahu – 89
Kaneohe, Oahu – 85
Kahului, Maui – 86
Hilo, Hawaii – 86
Kailua-kona – 83

Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level, and on the taller mountains…at 5 p.m. Wednesday evening:

Barking Sands, Kauai – 85F  
Kahului, Maui – 79

Haleakala Crater- 46 (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 39 (near 14,000 feet on the Big Island)

Precipitation Totals – The following numbers represent the largest precipitation totals (inches) during the last 24 hours on each of the major islands, as of Wednesday afternoon:

0.43 Mount Waialeale, Kauai
0.20 Oahu Forest NWR, Oahu
0.00 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.00 Kahoolawe
0.17 Puu Kukui, Maui
0.01 Kahuku Ranch, Big Island

Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a 1026 millibar high pressure system located north of Hawaii. Our local trade winds will remain active, blowing generally in the light to moderately strong range, although locally a bit stronger in those windiest areas.

Satellite and Radar Images: To view the cloud conditions we have here in Hawaii, please use the following satellite links, starting off with the Infrared Satellite Image of the islands to see all the clouds around the state during the day and night. This next image is one that gives close images of the islands only during the daytime hours, and is referred to as a Close-up visible image. This next image shows a larger view of the Pacific…giving perspective to the wider ranging cloud patterns in the Pacific Ocean. To help you keep track of where any showers may be around the islands, here’s the latest animated radar image. 

Hawaii’s Mountains – Here’s a link to the live webcam on the summit of near 14,000 foot Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. The tallest peak on the island of Maui is the Haleakala Crater, which is near 10,000 feet in elevation. These two webcams are available during the daylight hours here in the islands…and when there’s a big moon rising just after sunset for an hour or two! Plus, during the nights and early mornings you will be able to see stars, and the sunrise too…depending upon weather conditions.

Aloha Paragraphs

 

  Windsurfing action offshore from Kaanapali, Maui
   Photo Credit: flickr.com

 

The trade wind speeds have slipped a touch, blowing now in the light to moderately strong category. As usual, the windy MaalaeaBay on Maui, with its venture wind acceleration, will have considerably higher gusts than most other areas around the state. The winds are light enough in fact, that the NWS has cancelled the long lasting small craft wind advisory. The computer models show the trade winds continuing through this week, right on into next week. This weather map, shows a moderately strong 1027 millibar high pressure system, located to the north-northwest of our islands…the source of our trade winds now. That same weather chart shows what we call a cyclone family of low pressure systems…stretching from off of Japan, across the western Pacific, through the International Dateline…into our central Pacific. This is a rather unusual example of low pressure systems lined up more or less a row. 

There will be just the normal amount of passing shower activity along the windward sides for the time being. An area of showers, associated with an old cold front, missed most of the state, impacting only Kauai and Oahu…where light to moderately heavy showers fell. Maui and the BigIsland were too far south to poke into this minor batch of showers. The leeward sides will remain quite sunny for the most part during the days, with generally dry conditions prevailing. The one exception might be for a few showers to spill over the lower mountains on the smaller islands, and on the slopes above Kona during the afternoons. We may see a slight increase in windward showers later on Thursday or Friday, due to the arrival of a shower enhancing upper level low pressure trough then. There are no organized rain makers heading in our direction at this time…with exceptionally dry air well upstream of the islands.

It’s early Wednesday evening here in Kula, Maui, as I begin writing this last paragraph of today’s narrative. When I left the Pacific Disaster Center, in Kihei, I found unusually clear skies on the drive upcountry. As a matter of fact, looking out towards the windward side, towards Paia and Haiku, there really isn’t a cloud in sight. Here in Kula, where clouds gathered during the afternoon hours, and showers fell, the clouds are long gone as well. Glancing back downcountry, I see that the West Mountains are still wearing their customary cap of clouds. It’s really one of those rare summer evenings, when clouds are nearly non-existent. Looking at this satellite image, we see just a few clouds, which don’t look like particularly wet ones to the east…being carried our way on the light to moderately strong trade winds. I anticipate Thursday should continue the long string of fair weather days that we’ve seen during the last week. I hope you have a great night, and that you’ll plan on meeting me here again on Thursday for the next new weather narrative from paradise. I’ll be up well before sunrise preparing the text for that narrative, as usual. Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting:

Most Americans think that the worst of the fuel price spike that pushed gasoline above $4 per gallon has passed, but they have little hope that the housing market will stage a swift recovery, according to a Reuters/Zogby poll released on Wednesday. The economy has jumped to the top of voters’ concerns this election year, eclipsing the Iraq War, and that has put the housing bust and rising inflation squarely in the spotlight. The poll of 1,089 likely voters found that just under 13 percent thought gasoline prices would rise a lot between now and the end of the year. About one quarter thought prices would rise a little, while one in three thought they would drop a little and 18 percent said they would stay about the same.

The survey was conducted August 14-16, when oil prices had come down some $30 from a July 11 peak above $147 per barrel, and the national average price for a gallon of gasoline fell back below the psychologically significant $4 mark.
Pollster John Zogby said the swift rise in fuel prices earlier this year had fundamentally changed U.S. consumer behavior, and a pullback below $115 per barrel was not sufficient to alter that. "The lines are not forming to buy Hummers," he said, referring to the big luxury trucks that are notorious for their poor fuel mileage. Mounting costs for necessities like food and gasoline have strained household budgets, leaving less money for spending on discretionary items. That has put a dent in the U.S. economy, which was already struggling to overcome the housing slump and financial market turmoil.

Interesting2: The U.S. public, while aware of the deteriorating global environment, is concerned predominantly with local and national environmental issues, according to results from a recent survey. "The survey’s core result is that people care about their communities and express the desire to see government action taken toward local and national issues," said David Konisky, a policy research scholar with the Institute of Public Policy and assistant professor in the Truman School of Public Affairs at the University of Missouri, who conducted the study. "People are hesitant to support efforts concerning global issues even though they believe that environmental quality is poorer at the global level than at the local and national level.

This is surprising given the media attention that global warming has recently received and reflects the division of opinion about the severity of climate change."  Konisky recently surveyed 1,000 adults concerning their attitudes about the environment. The survey polled respondents about their levels of concern for the environment and preferences for government action to address a wide set of environmental issues.  A strong majority of the public expressed general concern about the environment. According to the survey, the top three issues that the public wants the government to address are protecting community drinking water, reducing pollution of U.S. rivers and lakes, and improving urban air pollution issues like smog. In the survey, global warming ranks eighth in importance.

Interesting3

:

The confirmation of Martian water ice by the Phoenix Mars Lander may hint at the planet’s potential for supporting life — or at least human life. NASA scientists have quietly developed technologies such as microwave beams for future explorers to extract water from the moon or Mars, even as the Phoenix team focuses on finding out more about the Martian climate and history of water. "If there is an outpost, there’s a need for water, and we don’t want to bring water from Earth," said Edwin Ethridge, a materials scientist at NASA’s MarshallSpaceFlightCenter in Huntsville, Ala. Water could provide more than just an extraterrestrial drink: the right equipment could break down water for oxygen and even fuel for a human mission. That could lighten the load and cost of any future mission heading for the moon or Mars. Ethridge spends most of his time working on the Ares rockets slated to return NASA astronauts to the moon.

So perhaps it’s no surprise that he devotes his spare moments to tinkering with a device that can beam microwaves down to help extract underground water ice. "One of the chief advantages of microwaves is that it will penetrate the soil, and so would greatly minimize if not eliminate requirement to dig," Ethridge told SPACE.com. Eliminating the need to dig would also reduce the chance for dust to cause problems with astronauts and their equipment. Microwaves could also work better on the moon given its near-vacuum environment and super-insulating lunar dust. Ethridge worked with colleague Bill Kaukler, also at NASA Marshall, to run demonstration tests on simulated lunar permafrost. They found that they could remove 98 percent of water ice through sublimation, or converting the frozen water directly into a gas, and could also capture 99 percent of the extracted water.

Interesting4:

Whether an ant becomes a dominant queen or a lowly worker is determined by both nature and nurture, it turns out. A new study found that an ant’s social status in its colony depends both on its genetic inheritance and the food it eats when it is young. Researchers studied Florida harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex badius) to investigate what factors decide a particular ant’s social caste. "Basically what we found is that things are more complicated than previously thought," said researcher Christopher R. Smith, a former graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and now a postdoctoral researcher at Arizona State University.

"Our study shows that there is a large genetic component to caste determination, but that there is also a very strong environmental component." The study, led by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign biologist Andrew Suarez, was detailed in the August issue of the journal American Naturalist. In P. badius societies there is only one social trajectory for males — they are produced about once a year and "do nothing but mate and die," Smith said.

Interesting5: Tiny transmitters attached to Atlantic salmon are helping to solve a mystery about their lengthy and sometimes fatal ocean treks and why the fish’s population numbers are dropping. Adult salmon are champion swimmers, often trekking more than 2,500 miles (4,000 km) from rivers to the ocean feeding grounds and back to these same rivers to reproduce. Once salmon hatchlings emerge from their eggs in freshwater rivers, they spend the first two to three years of their lives in that water before migrating to the ocean. However, for every, say, 140 salmon that reach the ocean, only one fish returns to the river, said Mike Stokesbury, director of research for the Ocean Tracking Network (OTN), headquartered at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia.

"They know the fish are dying in the ocean, but they don’t know where." The transmitters showed that significant numbers of the fish are at least making it well into the sea, rather than dying as soon as they enter the ocean. About 30 percent of a tagged group migrated from a river in Maine at least 370 miles (600 km) in the ocean to a region off the coast of Halifax, Nova Scotia, on their way to feeding grounds off of Greenland. "Salmon are an iconic fish, but they’re becoming endangered and people want to know what’s happening to the population," Stokesbury said. "This is the first step to finding out where in the ocean the salmon are dying and what’s causing the decline." 

Interesting6: Hordes of mountain pine beetles are decimating British Columbian forests. Rising temperatures due to global warming have boosted the beetles’ numbers by increasing their reproductive rate and reducing their winter die-off. Now, in a perverse twist, a new study shows that in a few years, the pests will have turned the once climate-friendly forests into net emitters of carbon dioxide (CO2). Since 2000, the beetles have killed off more than 32 million acres of forest, according to Werner A. Kurz and a team of scientists from the Canadian Forest Service. Kurz and colleagues say the current outbreak is an order of magnitude larger than any previous mountain-pine-beetle explosion, and they predict it will take another twelve years or so to taper off.

That’s a lot of dead trees, which release CO2 as they decompose. Meanwhile, there are fewer healthily growing trees left to absorb the greenhouse gas through photosynthesis. Using a computer model, Kurz’s team calculated that by 2020, the beetles will have killed so much forest that their net effect will be the equivalent of five years of CO2 emissions by all the cars and trucks of Canada. Kurz and his team are the first to account for large-scale insect outbreaks in an analysis of forest carbon balances — and to show the positive feedback loop between climate change and insect pests. They’re unlikely to be the last, however, given the risk of more boreal forests falling prey to warmth-loving insects. The research was detailed in the journal Nature.

Interesting7:

Here’s the new taste sensation — your tongue might be able to taste calcium. The capability to taste calcium has now been discovered in mice. With these rodents and humans sharing many of the same genes, the new finding suggests that people might also have such a taste. The four tastes we are most familiar with are sweet, sour, salty and bitter. Recently scientists have discovered tongue molecules called receptors that detect a fifth distinct taste — "umami," or savory. "But why stop there?" asked researcher Michael Tordoff, a behavioral geneticist at the MonellChemicalSensesCenter in Philadelphia. "My group has been investigating what we believe is another taste quality — calcium." So assuming the human palate can detect calcium, what does the mineral taste like? "Calcium tastes calcium-y," Tordoff said. "There isn’t a better word for it.

It is bitter, perhaps even a little sour. But it’s much more because there are actual receptors for calcium, not just bitter or sour compounds."  One way we might regularly perceive calcium is when it comes to minute levels found in drinking water. "In tap water, it’s fairly pleasant," Tordoff said. "But at levels much above that, the taste becomes increasingly bad."  There may be a strong link between the bitterness of certain vegetables and their calcium level. High-calcium vegetables include collard greens, bok choy, kale and bitter melon. One reason some people might avoid these veggies, Tordoff suggests, is because of their calcium taste. Ironically, while milk and other dairy products are loaded with calcium, the mineral tends to bind to fats and proteins, which prevents you from tasting it in these foods.