Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs / August 5-6, 2008

Aloha Paragraphs



   Inside the Haleakala Crater on Maui
   Photo Credit: flickr.com

A strengthening high pressure system to the northeast of Hawaii, will drive blustery trade winds across our tropical latitudes through the work week. Now that the trade wind reducing upper level trough of low pressure is out of our region, there’s nothing stopping the trade winds from getting stronger and gusty.  The NWS forecast office in Honolulu has a small craft wind advisory for those windiest areas around the state, stretching from the channel separating Oahu and Molokai…down across Maui to the Big Island. Our local trade winds will reach their peak in strength Thursday and Friday, easing off a touch by the weekend. The computer forecast models show no end to the breezy trade winds, continuing right on into next week.

Drier air has moved into the state now, which will limit showers…although they will pick up again some a tad Thursday. Whatever generally windward showers that fall, will occur most often during the night and early morning hours. As the trade winds strength Thursday and Friday, all that wind will force moisture up the sides of the volcanic slopes, on the windward sides, which will cause at least some increase in showers. The weather is expected to turn somewhat drier again as we move into the upcoming weekend…as the trade winds slip back some in strength. The leeward sides should be quite dry to very dry through most of this week in contrast to the wetter windward sections.

That area of disturbed weather, to the southeast of the Big Island, has taken on a mild counterclockwise spin. Here’s a looping satellite picture of that tropical disturbance, down to the lower right of the Big Island. We’ll need to keep an eye on this area, just in case it decides to strengthen into a tropical depression. There are no signs of it moving northward towards the Hawaiian Islands at this time. The main effect it will have, will be to enhance the strength of our local trade winds later this week. By the way, while we’re looking at that looping satellite image, we can see lots of high cirrus clouds coming up from the deeper tropics to our southwest…which dim and filter our Hawaiian sunshine at times locally, and provide some good color at sunset and sunrise!

Weather conditions are very dry now in Hawaii, with strong trade winds, and low relative humidities. The combination of these weather elements has led the NWS forecast office in Honolulu to issue a fire weather watch. A fire weather watch means that critical fire weather conditions are forecast to occur. This watch begins Wednesday morning, and will run through at least Wednesday evening for select areas of the state of Hawaii…and could lead into a fire weather warning later this week. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has issued a drought declaration for the entire state of Hawaii recently. We all need to do our part in keeping wild fires and brush fires from breaking out, and in conserving water when possible! 

~~~ It’s early Tuesday evening here in Kihei, Maui, as I begin writing this last paragraph of today’s narrative. Windy weather will remain in place through the remainder of the week, into next week…although slacking-off some by this weekend. There were hardly any clouds in the sky over most of the island chain Tuesday, although satellite imagery shows a patch of clouds and showers moving onto the Big Islands windward sides, with a break after that for several hours…before another pocket of moisture arrives later in the night. The rest of the state should be quite clear overnight, except where the thick high cirrus clouds are located. The thickest part at the time of this writing was over Kauai, although it appears to be shifting eastward over the rest of the state with time. Here in Kihei, while I was at the beach at lunch, the ocean surface was completely covered with white caps, millions of them, chalking-up the ocean in a frothy way. The coconut palm trees were bending over pretty well, under the influence of the gusty afternoon trade winds. Get to the beach earlier in the days, that is if you’d prefer to not have sand in your potato salad! 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:  A lost world has been found in Antarctica, preserved just the way it was when it was frozen in time some 14 million years ago.  The fossils of plants and animals high in the mountains is an extremely rare find in the continent, one that also gives a glimpse of a what could be there in a century or two as the planet warms. A team working in an ice-free region has discovered the trove of ancient life in what must have been the last traces of tundra on the interior of the southernmost continent before temperatures began to drop relentlessly. A team working in an ice-free region has discovered the trove of ancient life in what must have been the last traces of tundra on the interior of the southernmost continent before temperatures began to drop relentlessly.

An abrupt and dramatic climate cooling of 8°C in 200,000 years forced the extinction of tundra plants and insects and brought interior Antarctica into a perpetual deep-freeze from which it has never emerged, though may do again as a result of climate change. An international team led by Prof David Marchant, at Boston University and Profs Allan Ashworth and Adam Lewis, at North Dakota State University, combined evidence from glaciers, from the preserved ecology, volcanic ashes and modelling to reveal the full extent of the big freeze in a part of Antarctica called the Dry Valleys. The new insight in the understanding of Antarctica’s climatic history, which saw it change from a climate like that of South Georgia to one similar to that seen today in Mars, is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

"We’ve documented the timing and the magnitude of a tremendous change in Antarctic climate," said Prof Marchant. "The fossil finds allow us to examine Antarctica as it existed just prior to climate cooling at 13.9 million years ago. It is a unique window into the past. To study these deposits is akin to strolling across the Dry Valleys 14.1 million years ago."  The discovery of lake deposits with perfectly preserved fossils of mosses, diatoms and minute crustacea called ostracods is particularly exciting, noted Prof Lewis. "They are the first to be found even though scientific expeditions have been visiting the Dry Valleys.

Interesting2: Software predicts where El Nino will strike again. El Nino events periodically wreak havoc on the world’s weather, increasing the risk of hurricanes and flooding in some regions, and droughts and forest fires in others.  But despite telltale signs of their presence in the Pacific Ocean, including a reversal of ocean currents and large temperature rises, it can be hard to tell where else El Ninos are having an effect. However, forecasting the weather during an El Niño event could soon be as simple as joining the dots, thanks to software that maps the world’s climate as an interconnected network. The software, developed by a team led by Avi Gozolchiani from Bar-IlanUniversity in Ramat-Gan, Israel, plots daily temperature measurements for each of several locations to nodes of the network. It then calculates links between nodes if their measurements change in the same way.

By applying the technique to climate records from 1979 to 2005, the team found that the majority of these links are stable over time, forming a "skeleton" to the world’s climate. Yet it’s the weaker links, which break and then reform, that are of more interest. Under normal climate conditions this happens only occasionally, but disturbances from an El Niño event cause the links to "blink" on and off every few weeks. "Their behaviour becomes much more erratic," says Gozolchiani, whose team includes researchers from the Tokyo University of Information Sciences in Japan. The location of the blinking links reveal where the El Niño is having an influence, he says.

Interesting3:

The haze blanketing Beijing lifted slightly on Tuesday although the sun was obscured by grey skies three days before the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. Organizers want clean and crisp skies for the Games and have closed factories and pulled half the capital’s 3.3 million cars off the roads to achieve their ambition. They are holding in reserve further plans to reduce the number of cars on the roads and shut more factories, if projections show unacceptable conditions in coming days. The pollution index for Tuesday was between 90 and 110, moderating from 95 to 115 overnight. China regards an index level of less than 100 to be a "blue sky day". Many athletes pouring into Beijing ahead of the Games appeared to be more struck by the heat than the pollution. "The humidity’s quite fun, it’s like rowing through a steam room," said British rower Olivia Whitlam. Renata Ribeiro, a Brazilian beach volleyball player from Rio de Janeiro, thought fears about pollution were overstated.

"We’d been told it was absolutely terrible so we were prepared for much worse. It’s actually not that heavy today. We’re breathing fine," she said. However, for athletes of endurance events the smog could pose a major problem and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has said it might reschedule events if the pollution was too bad. The local Games organizers, BOCOG, have pledged to finish the Games on August 24 so most observers believe the IOC would switch the men’s marathon, due to take place on the final day, to another Chinese city if the air quality was deemed too poor. The IOC has not said what it regards as an acceptable pollution level for the marathon. Beijing would be cloudy and hot through Thursday, the China Meteorological Administration said.

Interesting4:

An update announced today to the 2008 hurricane forecast calls for two more storms than previously predicted — a total of 17 named storms for the entire season, which officially started June 1 and ends Nov. 30.  Philip Klotzbach and William Gray of ColoradoStateUniversity now expect nine of the named storms to become hurricanes and five to grow into major hurricanes, meaning a category 3 through 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale. Overall, the researchers predict a much more active season than the typical season between 1950 and 2000.  The announcement comes as Tropical Storm Edouard, the fifth tropical cyclone of the 2008 season, carried heavy rains and strong winds onto the upper Texas coast today. The tropical storm was just shy of hurricane strength when it came ashore. 

When a tropical cyclone (the generic name for a low-pressure system over tropical or sub-tropical waters) has surface winds that reach at least 39 mph (about 63 kph), the system is considered a tropical storm and gets christened with a name. Once the winds reach 74 mph (119 kph), the storm is considered a hurricane in the North Atlantic Ocean; a tropical cyclone in the Southwest Indian Ocean; and a typhoon in parts of the Northwest Pacific Ocean. The latest forecast raises the team’s early June prediction, which was 15 named storms, including eight hurricanes and four intense hurricanes.  The team points to warm sea-surface temperatures and low sea-level pressures over the tropical Atlantic in June and July, combined with an active early season in the deep tropics as driving the boost in their seasonal forecast numbers.