Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs / September 20-21, 2008

September 20-21 2008

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

Lihue, Kauai – 85
Honolulu, Oahu – 89
Kaneohe, Oahu – 83
Kahului, Maui – 89
Hilo, Hawaii – 83
Kailua-kona – 86

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

Honolulu, Oahu – 87F  
Kaneohe, Oahu – 81

Haleakala Crater- 50 (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 41 (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 Saturday afternoon:

0.47 Lihue airport, Kauai
2.01 Lihue, Kauai, Oahu
0.00 Molokai
0.01 Lanai
0.00 Kahoolawe
0.07 Oheo Gulch, Maui
0.29 Kealakekua, Big Island

Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a 1024 millibar high pressure system located to the northeast of Hawaii. This pressure configuration will keep trade winds blowing in the light to moderately strong category Sunday and Monday…locally stronger and gusty.

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

  The gorgeous island of Kauai
Photo Credit: flickr.com

Our trade winds have picked up in strength Saturday. These trade winds will gain even a bit more speed Sunday. As high pressure strengthens this weekend to our north, our local trade winds are getting a lift, becoming moderately strong as we push into the new week. The trade winds will remain with us through the first part of the new week ahead. Looking further ahead, it appears that the trade winds may calm down quite a bit after mid-week, as a cold front approaches the state from the northwest direction…pushing a ridge of high pressure deeper into the tropics.

Showers will be most active along the windward sides, with a possible increase in showers over the next several days. An upper level trough of low pressure is edging our way now, which can simply be thought of as cooler air aloft. This will help to destabilize our atmosphere to some degree, making our local clouds more shower prone. This influence should be most pronounced later Sunday through the first day or two of the new week. Meanwhile, the leeward sides may begin to see some showers during the afternoon hours too…which could become locally quite generous as well.

It’s early Saturday evening here in Kula, Maui, as I begin writing this last paragraph of today’s tropical weather narrative from Hawaii.  We’re now into the last few hours of summer 2008. The official beginning of autumn occurs at 5:44am Monday morning here in the islands. Summer will give way to the autumn season with a chance of increased showers later Sunday into Monday or Tuesday. The wild card at this point, will be whether or not there will be enough moisture around to feed these heavier showers. ~~~ Friday evening I went to see the new film called Righteous Kill (2008), starring Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. The long and short of this film is that a pair of veteran New York City police detectives are on the trail of a vigilante serial killer, in this adrenaline fueled psychological thriller. The critics have not been kind to this film, as an example: "Al Pacino and Robert De Niro do their best to elevate this dowdy genre exercise, but even these two greats can’t resuscitate the film’s hackneyed script." Despite the low ratings for this film, I went to see it anyway, as I’m fairly easy to please, and a sucker for these kinds of action/adventure flicks. I have to agree, that it wasn’t the best film I’ve seen this year, far from it, but for me, it was good enough to have made it worth my while to sit through. I found it a bit clunky at times, although the interaction between Mr. De Niro and Mr. Pacino, was entertaining. There was an interesting twist at the end, which caught me by surprise. Here’s a trailer for this film. ~~~ Saturday was a good day in a weather sense, with lots of sunshine, and just a bit more hazy than we’ve seen lately. The showers noted in the paragraphs above haven’t reached our islands yet, and may take until late Sunday before we see definite signs of their presence. The cooling air Saturday night might bring an increase in showers along the windward sides, but Sunday night into Monday will be the more favorable time frame for the increase in showers. ~~~ Sunset was great here in Kula, it was warm, even after the sun set. Typically I’d have a fleece parka vest, or its companion full parka, on at this time of day, but even now, at 640pm Saturday evening, its still a relatively warm 67.3F degrees, at this 3,100 foot elevation, on this western slope of the Haleakala Crater.  I’ll be back Sunday morning with your next new weather narrative, I hope you have a great Saturday night until then! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting:

Kraft is the latest company to turn part of its waste stream into a bigger bottom line. Two cheese plants in New York will turn used whey into energy in a move that will supplant a third of the facilities’ natural gas purchases. The company also will avoid the expense of hauling the waste away. Digesters at the company’s Lowville plant, which makes Philadelphia cream cheese, and a string cheese plant in Campbell turn the whey into biogas. It’s part of the company’s broader efforts to green operations in the areas of agriculture, packaging, energy, water, waste and transportation. "Our facilities have previously used strategies such as concentrating the whey to reduce volume and finding outlets for it to be used as animal feed, or for fertilizer on environmentally approved farm fields," said Sustainability Vice President Steve Yucknut.

"Both methods required transporting the whey off-site. Now, we’re reducing the associated CO2 emissions that are part of transporting waste, discharging cleaner wastewater from our on-site treatment systems, and creating enough alternative energy to heat more than 2,600 homes in the Northeast." The company’s broader goals include reducing energy consumption and energy-related CO2 by 25 percent, and manufacturing plant waste by 15 percent. Rather than sending it to landfills, companies from across several sectors are increasingly viewing waste as a commodity. General Motors, for example, recently announced that half of its manufacturing plants worldwide would reach landfill-free status by 2010, with scrap metal sales topping $1 billion. McDonald’s successfully transformed waste into electricity earlier this year at several United Kingdom restaurants, while Chrysler is converting used paint solids from two St. Louis assembly plants into electricity. Heinz also is working on a program to transform used potato peels into energy.













Interesting2:

The Lake Tanganyika area, in southeast Africa, is home to nearly 130 million people living in four countries that bound the lake, the second deepest on Earth. Scientists have known that the region experiences dramatic wet and dry spells, and that rainfall profoundly affects the area’s people, who depend on it for agriculture, drinking water and hydroelectric power. Scientists thought they knew what caused those rains: a season-following belt of clouds along the equator known as the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ). Specifically, they believed the ITCZ and rainfall and temperature patterns in the Lake Tanganyika area marched more or less in lockstep. When the ITCZ moved north of the equator during the northern summer, the heat (and moisture) would follow, depriving southeast Africa of moisture and rainfall. When the ITCZ moved south of the equator during the northern winter, the moisture followed, and southeast Africa got rain.

Now a Brown-led research team has discovered the ITCZ may not be the key to southeast Africa‘s climate after all. Examining data from core sediments taken from Lake Tanganyika covering the last 60,000 years, the researchers report in this week’s Science Express that the region’s climate instead appears to be linked with ocean and atmospheric patterns in the Northern Hemisphere. The finding underscores the interconnectedness of the Earth’s climate — how weather in one part of the planet can affect local conditions half a world away. The discovery also could help scientists understand how tropical Africa will respond to global warming, said Jessica Tierney, a graduate student in Brown’s Geological Sciences Department and the paper’s lead author.

Interesting3:

Abrupt climate change is a potential menace that hasn’t received much attention. That’s about to change. Through its Climate Change Prediction Program, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Biological and Environmental Research (OBER) recently launched IMPACTS – Investigation of the Magnitudes and Probabilities of Abrupt Climate Transitions – a program led by William Collins of Berkeley Lab’s Earth Sciences Division (ESD) that brings together six national laboratories to attack the problem of abrupt climate change, or ACC. Sparked by the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize that was shared by Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the reality of global warming finally got through to the majority of the world’s population. Most people think of climate change as something that occurs only gradually, however, with average temperature changing two or three degrees Celsius over a century or more; this is the rate at which ‘forcing’ mechanisms operate, such as the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere due to the burning of fossil fuels or widespread changes in land use.

But climate change has occurred with frightening rapidity in the past and will almost certainly do so again. Perhaps the most famous example is the reverse hiccup in a warming trend that began 15,000 years ago and eventually ended the last ice age. Roughly 2,000 years after it started, the warming trend suddenly reversed, and temperatures fell back to near-glacial conditions; Earth stayed cold for over a thousand years, a period called the Younger Dryas (named for an alpine wildflower). Then warming resumed so abruptly, that global temperatures shot up 10 °C, in just 10 years. Because civilizations hadn’t yet emerged, complex human societies escaped this particular roller-coaster ride. Nevertheless, some form of abrupt climate change is highly likely in the future, with wide-ranging economic and social effects.

Interesting4:

The Caribbean and GulfCoast have seen a spate of devastating hurricanes in recent years that have cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives. As residents recover from the latest hits, they may wonder about the potential for future Ike’s and Katrina’s. Hurricanes, of course, are nothing new to the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico, where tropical storms form between June and November each year. But many factors, both natural and man-made, can affect the number, strength, size and impact of the storms that form each season. For example, the recent surge in storms followed an almost two-decade lull that was part of a natural cycle in hurricane formation. During that lull, new coastal residents built homes in what they thought was a paradise. But now they’ve found out just how susceptible they are to nature’s wrath. And it looks like the situation might only get worse. In 2003, more than half the U.S. population (or about 153 million people) lived along the Gulf and Southeastern U.S. coastline — an increase of 33 million people from 1980 — and that number is just expected to keep rising.

The buildup of these communities in recent decades and the environmental damage that development has caused exacerbate the impact of hurricanes. "There’s been an explosion of population along our coast," said Amanda Staudt, a climate scientist with the National Wildlife Federation (NWF). "That’s just putting a lot more people in harm’s way." This is particularly true in Florida, Texas and North Carolina, where populations are increasing the fastest. Hurricanes are especially a threat for homes right on the beach or on barrier islands, such as Galveston, because they receive the full brunt of a hurricane’s storm surge. Coastal features such as barrier islands and wetlands act as natural protection against a hurricane’s storm surge, slowing it down and absorbing some of the impact. Studies have shown that every mile of wetlands reduces storm surge by about 3 to 9 inches and every acre reduces the cost of damages from a storm by $3,300, Staudt said. "Our wetlands and barrier islands … are our first line of defense," she said.