September 15-16 2008
Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Monday afternoon:
Lihue, Kauai – 85
Honolulu, Oahu – 89
Kaneohe, Oahu – 84
Kahului, Maui – 88
Hilo, Hawaii – 83
Kailua-kona – 85
Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level, and on the taller mountains…at 4 p.m. Monday afternoon:
Barking Sands, Kauai – 87F
Hilo, Hawaii – 77
Haleakala Crater- 50 (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 46 (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 Monday afternoon:
0.58 Hanapepe, Kauai
0.96 Kalaeloa airport, Oahu
0.04 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.10 Kahoolawe
0.34 Oheo Gulch, Maui
0.42 Waiakea Uka, Big Island
Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a 1022 millibar high pressure system located to the northeast of Hawaii…with its associated ridge, located northeast of the islands. This pressure configuration will keep our winds light to moderately strong Tuesday and Wednesday.
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
Aloha Paragraphs
Beautiful orchid
Photo Credit: flickr.com
Light trade winds began filtering back into our Hawaiian Islands Monday, which will strengthen into Tuesday. The light SE breezes this past weekend, brought lots of volcanic haze up over the islands, from the vents on the Big Island. Monday started off with poor air visibilities, although by the afternoon hours, the trade winds had nicely begun clearing our local atmosphere. It will take until Tuesday before we see normal air visibilities. The trade winds will continue blowing through the rest of new week…getting lighter again Thursday.
Now that the trade winds have returned, the bias for showers will move back over to the windward sides. The night and early morning hours will be the favored time of day for these mostly light showers. There may still be some clouds gathering over and around the mountains during the afternoon, with a few showers falling locally. Rainfall will generally be light through the upcoming week…with nothing heavy on the horizon at this time.
It’s early Monday evening here in Kihei, Maui, as I begin writing this last paragraph of today’s tropical weather narrative from Hawaii. The trade winds returned right on schedule today, helping to clear the muggy conditions away, and more importantly…the leftover volcanic haze from this past weekend. Looking out the window, before I leave for home, the skies are almost completely clear of clouds, with hardly a trace of volcanic haze! This is good news, as we love our cooling and refreshing trade winds. The rest of the week looks favorably inclined weatherwise, although with the trade winds getting lighter during the second half of the week, we may turn slightly sultry again then. At that time we may begin to see more clouds over the leeward slopes too, with perhaps a few showers returning. I’ll be back very early Tuesday morning with your next new weather narrative from paradise, I hope you have a great Monday night until then! Aloha for now…Glenn.
Interesting: Nearly half of the seafood we eat today is farmed. And while aquaculture is often equated with pollution, habitat degradation, and health risks, this explosive growth in fish farming may in fact be the most hopeful trend in the world’s increasingly troubled food system, according to a new report by Worldwatch Institute. In Farming Fish for the Future, Senior Researcher Brian Halweil illustrates how, if properly guided, fish farming can not only help feed an expanding global population, but also play a role in healing marine ecosystems battered by overfishing. "In a world where fresh water and grain supplies are increasingly scarce, raising seafood like oysters, clams, catfish, and tilapia is many times more efficient than factory-farmed chicken or beef," says Halweil. "Farmed fish can be a critical way to add to the global diet to hedge against potential crop losses or shortages in the supply of meat." "But not all fish farming is created equal," Halweil notes. Carnivorous species like salmon and shrimp, while increasingly popular, consume several times their weight in fish feed-derived from other, typically smaller, fish-as they provide in edible seafood. "It generally requires 20 kilograms of feed to produce just 1 kilogram of tuna," Halweil says. "So even as we depend more on farmed fish, a growing scarcity of fish feed may jeopardize future expansion of the industry."
Poorly run fish farms can generate coastal pollution in the form of excess feed and manure, and escaped fish and disease originating on farms can devastate wild fisheries. For example, a fish farm with 200,000 salmon releases nutrients and fecal matter roughly equivalent to the raw sewage generated by 20,000 to 60,000 people. Scotland’s salmon aquaculture industry is estimated to produce the same amount of nitrogen waste as the untreated sewage of 3.2 million people-just over half the country’s population. Cramped facilities can also create ill health for fish, costing producers millions of dollars in disease prevention and foregone revenues. In recent years, shrimp farmers in China have lost $120 million to bacterial fish diseases and $420 million to shrimp diseases. Fish farming has expanded to meet the soaring global demand for seafood. On average, each person on the planet is eating four times as much seafood as was consumed in 1950. The average per-capita consumption of farmed seafood has increased nearly 1,000 percent since 1970, in contrast to per-capita meat consumption, which grew just 60 percent. In 2006, fish farmers raised nearly 70 million tons of seafood worth more than $80 billion-nearly double the volume of a decade earlier. Experts predict that farmed seafood will grow an additional 70 percent by 2030.
Interesting2:
The main causes of population decrease include, infrastructure development, wetland reclamation, increasing pollution, and hunting pressure. These impacts are in many cases compounded by impacts of climate change and associated phenomena, such as increased frequency of droughts, sea-level rise and changes in Arctic tundra habitats. "Climate change… is likely to affect all ecosystems, but wetlands are especially vulnerable because of their sensitivity to changes in water level and susceptibility to changes in rainfall and evaporation." said Delany. Sea-level rise threatens coastal and inland wetland areas. These are crucial habitats for millions of migratory water birds. Huge numbers of water birds also breed in Arctic tundra habitats which too are threatened by climate change.
Interesting3: NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander has photographed several dust devils dancing across the arctic plain this week and sensed a dip in air pressure as one passed near the lander. These dust-lofting whirlwinds had been expected in the area, but none had been detected in earlier Phoenix images. The Surface Stereo Imager camera on Phoenix took 29 images of the western and southwestern horizon on Sept. 8, during mid-day hours of the lander’s 104th Martian day. The next day, after the images had been transmitted to Earth, the Phoenix science team noticed a dust devil right away. "It was a surprise to have a dust devil so visible that it stood with just the normal processing we do," said Mark Lemmon of Texas A&M University, College Station, lead scientist for the stereo camera. "Once we saw a couple that way, we did some additional processing and found there are dust devils in 12 of the images." At least six different dust devils appear in the images, some of them in more than one image. They range in diameter from about 2 meters (7 feet) to about 5 meters (16 feet).
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