Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs / August 4-5, 2008

Aloha Paragraphs



   Windward Oahu
   Photo Credit: flickr.com

The trade winds picked up Monday, and will do nothing but increase through the week. A departing trough of low pressure interrupted the normally stronger trade winds this past weekend. As this trough moved further away Monday however, our trade winds began to pick up, which will continue Tuesday onward through the rest of the week. The NWS forecast office in Honolulu issued a small craft wind advisory for those windiest areas in the southern part of the state, around Maui and the Big Island…which will likely need to be extended further up the island chain later this week. The computer forecast models show no end to the breezy trade winds at this point.

As the upper trough moves away, the emphasis for showers will leave the leeward sides…coming back over to the windward coasts and slopes now.  It appears that we’ll have drier air moving over the islands now, with whatever showers that fall going forward…falling most generally during the night and early morning hours. A trough of low pressure, that is expected to edge in our direction later in the week, around Thursday and Friday, may cause a temporary increase in showers along the windward sides then. The weather is expected to turn drier as we move into the upcoming weekend again. The leeward sides should be quite dry to very dry through most of this week.

~~~ It’s early Monday evening here in Kihei, Maui, as I begin writing this last paragraph of today’s narrative.  The trade winds kicked up their heels earlier than expected, and got stronger than anticipated as well. Several of the reporting stations around the state showed winds gusting to 30 mph or more early this evening, with the strongest gust noted at 40 mph on the small island of Kahoolawe. The winds will remain blustery this week, and regularly be gusting above 40 mph. Looking out the window I see mostly clear skies here on Maui, although there are some beautiful streaks of high cirrus clouds flying across the sky on the strong upper winds. These strands of high clouds will light up colorfully at sunset, and if they are still around early Tuesday morning, they will light up a bright orange and pink again then. Speaking of early Tuesday morning, that’s when I’ll be back here with your next new weather narrative from paradise. I hope you have a great Monday night until then! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting:

Untouched natural forests store three times more carbon dioxide than previously estimated and 60 percent more than plantation forests, said a new Australian study of "green carbon" and its role in climate change. Green carbon occurs in natural forests, brown carbon is found in industrialized forests or plantations, grey carbon in fossil fuels and blue carbon in oceans. Australian National University (ANU) scientists said that the role of untouched forests, and their biomass of green carbon, had been underestimated in the fight against global warming. The scientists said the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Kyoto Protocol did not distinguish between the carbon capacity of plantation forests and untouched forests. Yet untouched forests can carry three times the carbon presently estimated, if their biomass of carbon stock was included, said the ANU report released on Tuesday. Currently, forest carbon storage capacity is based on plantation forest estimates.

The report "Green Carbon, the role of natural forests in carbon storage" said a difference in the definition of a forest was also underestimating the carbon stock in old-growth forests. The IPCC defines a forest as trees taller than 2 meters (six feet) and a canopy cover greater than 10 percent, but in Australia a forest was defined as having trees taller than 10 meters (33 feet) and a canopy cover greater than 30 percent. The report said southeast Australia‘s unlogged forests could store about 640 tonnes per hectare (1,600 tonnes per acre), yet the IPCC estimate put it at only around 217 tonnes of carbon per hectare. The scientists estimated that around 9.3 billion tonnes of carbon can be stored in the 14.5 million hectares of eucalypt forests in southeast Australia if they are left undisturbed. The IPCC estimates only one third of this capacity and only 27 percent of the forests’ biomass carbon stock.

Interesting2:

Prospectors sift through America‘s garbage in a gold rush founded on metals, plastic and paper. Bob Cappadona, area manager of Casella Waste Systems’ 65,000sq ft recycling facility in Massachussets, can’t believe the record prices his garbage is commanding. "Aluminium cans, $900 [£450] a bale. Tin cans, $150. No 2 clear plastic, $300. Cardboard, $70. Mixed paper, $40." He barely conceals his glee as he explains the effects of a spike in metal prices: "We get an extra $100 a ton."  Mr Cappadona’s numbers are compelling, but the global implications of the trash boom only really hit you when you see the enormous pallets being carted away from the plant. You realise that recyclers can make vast profits from combing through ordinary rubbish, processing it and then reselling it to other companies.

And that leads to another, bigger thought: trash is no longer just an environmental liability. It is becoming a financial asset. And it is everywhere…or so it would seem. The possibilities have venture capitalists and buyout firms scrambling to invest in a melange of quirky start-ups that might have provoked belly laughs from these same financiers five years ago. The broad category of "waste and recycling", which includes everything from materials recovery to sewage biotechnology, drew a record $622m of investment in 2007, compared with $245m a year earlier and just $20m in 2001, according to Cleantech Group, a green investing consultancy. Sober investors are throwing money not only at established recyclers like Cas-ella Waste, but also at bolder ventures like trash-to-ethanol start-ups and e-waste recyclers, so confident are they that there’s real cash in trash.

Interesting3:

Alaska‘s warm weather this summer has all "gone north." Way north. Scientists at the National Snow and IceDataCenter say strong, southerly winds from the North Slope have devoured a huge swath of Arctic ice larger than the state of Texas in the heart of the Beaufort Sea. Combining that loss with the overall decline in sea ice in recent years should leave this year’s end-of-summer Arctic ice pack close to its lowest measurement on record. It may also open up the ice-encrusted Northwest Passage for the second year in a row — and only the second time in recorded history.

The Beaufort’s broad expanse of open water, which now extends more than a third of the way from Alaska to the North Pole, far surpasses the ice-free zone that prevailed there last summer when Arctic ice overall plummeted to a record low. Daily satellite images relayed to the NSIDC headquarters in Boulder, Colo., also indicate the Northwest Passage is ice-free as far east of Alaska as Amundsen Gulf, about 600 miles east of the Alaska-Canada border. All that remains to clear is a plug of ice that blocks the preferred northern sea route between Banks and Cornwallis islands, according to NSIDC senior research scientist Mark Serreze. "But we’re seeing signs that the ice concentration is dropping there now," Serreze said Thursday. "That plug could very well melt out in the next few weeks.

Interesting4:

Researchers in Germany, Switzerland, and the United States have shown, for the first time, that an extremely fast climate change occurred in Western Europe. This took place long before human-made changes in the atmosphere, and is causatively associated with a sudden change in the wind systems.  The research, which appears in the journal Nature Geoscience, was conducted by geoscientists Achim Brauer, Peter Dulski and Jörg Negendank (emeritus Professor) from the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, Gerald Haug from the DFG-LeibnizCenter for Surface Processes and Climate Studies at the University of Potsdam and the ETH in Zurich, and Daniel Sigman from PrincetonUniversity.

The proof of an extreme cooling within a short number of years 12,700 years ago was attained in sediments of the volcanic lake Meerfelder Maar in the Eifel region of Germany. The seasonally layered deposits allow to precisely determine the rate of climate change. With a novel combination of microscopic research studies and modern geochemical scanner procedures, the scientists were able to successfully reconstruct the climatic conditions even for individual seasons. In particular, the changes in the wind force and direction during the winter half-year caused the climate to topple over into a completely different mode within one year after a short instable phase of a few decades.

Interesting5:

The most powerful bite of all time has been found — that of the prehistoric giant shark Megalodon, which makes that of T. rex look puny. The giant shark Megalodon, which means "Big Tooth" in Greek, may have grown to more than 50 feet long and weighed up to 110 tons (100 metric tons), at least 30 times as heavy as the largest of its living relatives, the great white shark.  Fossil evidence suggests Megalodon "made a living hunting and killing large whales by biting off their tails and flippers," said researcher Stephen Wroe, a biomechanist and paleontologist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

The researchers used sophisticated computational techniques to analyze the bites of the great white shark and Megalodon, using the kind of software that engineers use to simulate "everything from wingnuts to bridges to space shuttles," Wroe explained.  The 3-D digital models that he and his colleagues developed, based on X-rays of an 8-foot-long male great white, recreate the skull, jaws, muscles of the shark as nearly 2 million tiny connected parts. "It takes a lot of computing power to analyze something as relatively simple as a set of jaws, since you’re dealing with all sorts of complex shapes in biology," Wroe said.