Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs / September 11-12, 2008

September 11-12 2008

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

Lihue, Kauai – 85
Honolulu, Oahu – 86
Kaneohe, Oahu – 85
Kahului, Maui – 89
Hilo, Hawaii – 84
Kailua-kona – 86

Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level, and on the taller mountains…at 4 p.m. Thursday afternoon:

Port Allen, Kauai – 86F  
Molokai airport – 75

Haleakala Crater- 45 (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 50 (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 Thursday afternoon:

0.29 Hanalei, Kauai
0.71 Manoa Valley, Oahu
0.49 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.00 Kahoolawe
0.38 Puu Kukui, Maui
0.30 Kealakekua, Big Island

Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a 1024 millibar high pressure system located far to the northeast of Hawaii…with its associated ridge now weakening to our north.  This pressure configuration will keep our local trade winds quite light Friday…becoming light and variable Saturday.

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

  Kayaking offshore from Kauai
Photo Credit: flickr.com

The Hawaiian Islands are entering into a period of lighter winds as we head into the weekend. We can look for light trades through Friday, then slipping down into the light and variable realms Saturday and Sunday…with daytime sea breezes. As the winds get lighter through the next several days, we could begin to see some haze start collecting in our atmosphere as well. The computer models suggest that early next week, we’ll see the trade winds rebound…with freshening breezes Tuesday into mid-week. 

There will still be a few windward showers, but the emphasis will be shifting to the leeward sides now. We may see some of those leeward showers spreading down towards the coast at times during the afternoon hours…with a couple of potentially heavy downpours. As the trade winds return next week, the bias for showers will shift back to the windward sides. 

Lighter trade winds mean several things here in the tropics, not the least of which is the sultry weather that will bear down on us…in terms of comfort levels through the rest of the week. Typically, under a convective weather pattern, we start our days off with slightly cooler than normal air temperatures, under clear skies. As the warm late summer sunshine beams down, it doesn’t take long before sea breezes kick-in during the mid-morning hours. This air flow off the ocean, carries moisture inland, and up the slopes of our islands. This invisible moisture, when it cools sufficiently (to the condensation level)…changes state into visible clouds. These late morning through early evening cumulus clouds, often drop rain. 

We have two active storms in the western Pacific Ocean…while hurricane Ike continues towards the Texas coast. Hurricane Ike continues to be a very dangerous storm, especially in terms of the storm surge on top of the tides…and the high surf as well, bringing a dramatic flooding situation to the lowlying coastal zones. This hurricane is moving across the very warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico…which in spots approaches 90F. The latest thinking puts a strong category 2 or even 3 hurricane, making landfall along the Texas coast Saturday morning. Here’s the latest  tracking map for Ike…along with this looping satellite image. Then in the western Pacific Ocean, we find very strong typhoon Sinlaku moving by Taiwan towards southern Japan, as well as tropical cyclone 16W. Here’s a tracking map for Sinlaku, and then one for 16W. There continues to be no tropical cyclone activity here in the central Pacific.

It’s early Thursday evening here in Kihei, Maui, as I begin writing this last section of today’s tropical weather narrative from Hawaii.  The focus for afternoon showers Wednesday afternoon was over Maui and the Big Island. This concentration of falling water shifted up the island chain Thursday, where the most generous showers fell from Kauai down through Molokai. The island of Oahu seemed to be getting the greatest rainfall totals later in the day. There were showers falling in the upcountry leeward slopes elsewhere too, which will continue Friday. Given the current inversion layer over the islands, which is right around 10,000 feet, which can be thought of as the cloud top layer…we could see some briefly heavy downpours here and there. ~~~  I’ll meet you back here very early Friday morning, when I’ll have your next new weather narrative waiting for you. Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting: A tiny frog species thought by many experts to be extinct has been rediscovered alive and well in a remote area of Australia‘s tropical north, researchers said Thursday. The 40 millimeters-long (1.5 inch) Armoured Mistfrog had not been seen since 1991, and many experts assumed it had been wiped out by a devastating fungus that struck northern Queensland state. But two months ago, a doctoral student at James Cook University in Townsville conducting research on another frog species in Queensland stumbled across what appeared to be several Armoured Mistfrogs in a creek, said professor Ross Alford, head of a research team on threatened frogs at the university. Conrad Hoskin, a researcher at The Australian National University in Canberra who has been studying the evolutionary biology of north Queensland frogs for the past 10 years, conducted DNA tests on tissue samples from the frogs and determined they were the elusive Armoured Mistfrog. Alford’s group got the results on Wednesday.

A spokeswoman for the Queensland Environmental Protection Agency also confirmed Hoskin’s findings. "A lot of us were starting to believe it had gone extinct, so to discover it now is amazing," Hoskin said. "It means some of the other species that are missing could potentially just be hidden away along some of the streams up there." Craig Franklin, a zoology professor at The University of Queensland who studies frogs, said the Mistfrog’s rediscovery was exciting. "It’s very significant," Franklin said. "We’ve lost so many frog species in Australia … Hopefully it’s a population that’s making a comeback."  The light brown frogs, with dark brown spots, congregate in areas with fast-flowing water. So far, between 30 and 40 have been found.

Interesting2: Dinosaurs are often seen as unlucky, having been wiped out by an asteroid. But they dominated Earth for more than 160 million years, evolving into a wild array of body types and sizes suited for many different ecological niches. Scientists previously thought that it was this evolutionary diversity that enabled the dinosaurs’ reign, allowing them to out-compete similar groups of reptiles, but a new study, detailed in the Sept. 11 issue of the journal Science, shows that it was really just a matter of luck. "For a long time it was thought that there was something special about the dinosaurs that helped them become more successful during the Triassic, the first 30 million years of their history, but this isn’t true," said lead author of the study, Steve Brusatte, a Ph.D. student at Columbia University and affiliate of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

The closest competitors to the dinosaurs during the Triassic period (about 251 to 199 million years ago) were the crurotarsans, the ancestors of today’s crocodiles. Both dinosaurs and crurotarsans evolved and filled some of the same ecological niches after a massive extinction event at the end of the Permian period some 250 million years ago. Both groups also survived a later extinction event about 228 million years ago. But only the dinosaurs (and crocodiles) made it through a period of rapid global warming at the end of the Triassic 200 million years ago. And avian dinosaurs are still with us today in the form of modern birds, which evolved from theropod dinosaurs and survived a separate and later mass extinction event at the end of the Mesozoic Era.

Interesting3: In many spider species, females eat the males after sex. Studies have suggested various complex evolutionary reasons involving costs and benefits to the species, sperm competition and esoteric sexual selection schemes. Turns out the motivation for this creepy cannibalism is much simpler. It’s all about size. If males are small, they’re easier to catch and therefore more likely to be prey, say Shawn Wilder and Ann Rypstra from Miami University in Ohio. Big females eat their puny mates simply because a) they’re hungry and b) they can. Wilder and Rypstra found that among the wolf spider (Hogna helluo), large males were never eaten by their mates, while small males were consumed 80 percent of the time.  

Discovering this, the researchers then pored over the literature and found the size rule to hold true in a wide range of spider species. The finding is detailed in the September issue of the American Naturalist.  "We were surprised to find that such a simple characteristic such as how small males are relative to females has such a large effect on the frequency of sexual cannibalism," Wilder said.  Perhaps the most well-known example of spider-women eating spider-men is the black widow. But even that cannibalism case is overstated. For most of the many species of black widows, cannibalism is the exception, not the rule, according to Rod Crawford of the Burke Museum of Natural History & Culture at the University of Washington.