Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs / August 6-7, 2008

Aloha Paragraphs



   Hilo, Hawaii…often quite cloudy and showery
   Photo Credit: flickr.com

Our local trade winds will remain stronger than normal through Friday…and then relax in strength a little this weekend into next week.  The NWS forecast office in Honolulu has a small craft wind advisory for those windiest areas around the state, stretching from the Kaiwi 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 during the weekend. The computer forecast models show no end to the breezy trade winds, continuing right on into next week.

There will be showers falling along the windward sides, mostly at night, and along the leeward slopes…mostly during the afternoons. As the trade winds remain gusty Thursday and Friday, all that wind will force at least some moisture up the sides of the volcanic slopes, on the windward sides…which will cause a minor 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 just a little. The leeward sides should be quite dry, although there could be a few afternoon showers falling locally.

An area of disturbed weather, to the southeast of the Big Island, has spun up into the central Pacific’s first tropical depression of the 2008 hurricane season. Here’s a looping satellite picture of that tropical depression, called 01C, down to the lower right of the Big Island. Here’s a storm tracking map to show this depression in relation to the Hawaiian Islands – please notice that we have a new tropical storm in the eastern Pacific also, called Hernan. There are no signs of 01C moving northward towards the Hawaiian Islands. 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 has  dimmed and filtered our Hawaiian sunshine at times locally. This cirrus cloudiness should be moving away Thursday, for more sunshine.

~~~ It’s early Wednesday evening here in Kihei, Maui, as I begin writing this last section of today’s narrative. High clouds blocked our sunshine quite a bit Wednesday, too much so I’m sure for many folks! There were more than expected lower level clouds too, quite a a few of which dropped showers. Meanwhile, the trade winds continued to be on the strong and gusty side, at least locally…although even in this department, the winds were somewhat lighter than forecast too. All in all, the forecast today bombed to some degree! At 5pm the strongest wind gust that I saw was the 40 mph reading at Maalaea Bay here on Maui. While all this was happening, we had that a tropical disturbance to our southeast upgraded to a tropical depression named 01C. It is expected to take on the Hawaiian name of Kika once it, or if it strengthens into a tropical storm…which the forecasts have it doing so eventually. It poses no threat to the Hawaiian Islands, as you can see from the tracking map that I added a couple of paragraphs up this page. That doesn’t mean we don’t have to keep a sharp eyeball on it, as these storms can be tricky, and do things we don’t expect sometimes! I’ll be back very early Thursday morning with your next new weather narrative from paradise, I hope you have a great Wednesday night until then! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting: 

If you have a car, stop whatever you’re doing and go check the air pressure of your vehicle’s tires. Apart from keeping your car in park, pumping up your tires to their proper "PSI" – pounds per square inch – is the fastest, cheapest way to reduce the amount of gasoline you use. Tires have a tendency to lose pressure over time or when the weather changes substantially; a car driving on underinflated tires needs more gas to move. You can gain 3.3% in fuel efficiency by inflating your tires. And with gasoline costing over $4/per gallon, every 3.3% gain means money in your pocket.  That gain also affords an immediate way to increase our supply of oil. As Barack Obama has noted in his vision for an energy independent America, if we all pumped up our tires to their proper PSI, the U.S. could easily gain from conservation  (i.e., using less fuel) three times as much oil as we could reap from far more costly and environmentally dangerous off-shore oil drilling.

And that oil is available TODAY, not ten or twenty years hence – the time it takes to develop oil fields and convert petroleum into gasoline. "Efforts to improve conservation and efficiency happen to be the best approaches to dealing with the energy crisis — the cheapest, cleanest, quickest and easiest ways to ease our addiction to oil, reduce our pain at the pump and address global warming. It’s a pretty simple concept: if our use of fossil fuels is increasing our reliance on Middle Eastern dictators while destroying the planet, maybe we ought to use less," writes Michael Grunwald in Time. Tire gauges are cheap.

Interesting2:

Scientists have created the world’s thinnest balloon, made of a single layer of carbon just one atom thick. The fabric that the balloon is made of is leakproof to even the tiniest airborne molecules. It could find use in "aquariums" smaller than a red blood cell, through which scientists could peer at molecules, researchers suggested. The balloon is made of graphite, as found in pencils, which is made of atom-thin sheets of carbon stacked on top of each other known. The sheets are known as graphene. Graphene is highly electrically conductive, and scientists are feverishly researching whether it could find use in advanced circuitry and other devices. "We were studying little graphene trampolines, and by complete accident, we made a graphene sheet over a hole. Then we started studying it, and saw that it was trapping gas inside," said researcher Paul McEuen, a physicist at CornellUniversity in Ithaca, N.Y.  

By experimenting further with bubbles made of graphene, McEuen and his colleagues found the membranes were impermeable to even the smallest gas molecules, including helium. "It’s amazing that something only an atom thick can be an impenetrable barrier. You can have gas on one side and vacuum or liquid on the other, and with a wall only one atom thick, nothing would go through it," McEuen told LiveScience. In terms of applications, McEuen suggested one possibility which he called miniature aquariums for molecules. "You could have instruments on one side of the membrane, in vacuum or air, and on the other side you would have DNA or proteins suspended in liquid," he explained. "And then you could get right up close to image the molecules, within a few angstroms," or widths of an atom.  Other potential applications include hyper-fine sensors and ultra-pure filters.

Interesting3: The answer to “Got milk?” just got a little older: A new study indicates that people have been milking cattle and other domesticated animals as well as processing and storing milk products for 2,000 years longer than originally thought. A group of scientists studied thousands of pottery shards from sites all over the Near East and the Balkans and tested them for residues of milk fats. They found that milk was already being used and processed by societies there by the seventh millennium B.C. Previously, the earliest evidence of milk use came from the fifth millennium, though cattle, sheep and goats had already been domesticated by the eighth millennium. The traces of milk fats can survive on the pottery, even after being buried for thousands of years, because the fats are hydrophobic, so they don’t dissolve in water, and they are produced in large amounts, said study leader Richard Evershed of the University of Bristol in England.

Ceramic vessels are very porous, so if you store or cook animal products in them, "the pottery vessels pick up that organic matter like crazy," Evershed told LiveScience. The residues don’t indicate the presence of milk itself, as those would decay away very quickly, but instead suggest more processed dairy substances, such as butter, yogurt, ghee (or clarified butter), and possibly cheese, though cheese is largely altered by microbes and so may not leave a recognizable dairy signature, Evershed said. Evershed and his colleagues were surprised that they found the most residues in sites in Anatolia (most of modern Turkey), which lies outside the traditional Fertile Crescent region where agriculture was first developed.