Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs / September 9-10, 2008

September 9-10 2008

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

Lihue, Kauai – 85
Honolulu, Oahu – 88
Kaneohe, Oahu – 85
Kahului, Maui – 87
Hilo, Hawaii – 83
Kailua-kona – 84

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

Honolulu, Hawaii -86F  
Hilo, Hawaii – 80

Haleakala Crater- 45 (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 48 (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 Tuesday afternoon:

0.95 Mount Waialaele, Kauai
0.25 Oahu Forest NWR, Oahu
0.01 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.04 Kahoolawe
0.04 Oheo Gulch, Maui
0.23 Kealakekua, Big Island

Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a 1027 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 lighter Wednesday and Thursday, although still locally 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

  Hamoa Beach…near Hana, Maui
Photo Credit: flickr.com

The trade winds will continue to grace our Hawaiian Islands, although blow in a lighter form through the rest of this week. These balmy trade winds will provide just enough cooling relief from the late summer heat, to keep us feeling comfortable during the days. There appears to be little change in this light winded trade wind weather pattern well into the future. The computer models suggest that early next week, we may see the trade winds snap back into place…with freshening breezes then. 

There will be a few light showers spread out along the windward sides at night, and over the upcountry leeward areas during the afternoons.  The overlying atmosphere remains stable and relatively dry, limiting the shower production our local clouds. We may see some of the inland leeward showers spreading down towards the coast at times. There are still no organized rainmakers on the weather horizon at this time…suggesting fair weather will prevail through the rest of this week into the next. The latest satellite images show an area of high cirrus clouds coming our way from the south and southwest.

We now have two active storms in the western Pacific, a weakening tropical storm in the eastern Pacific heading towards Baja…and then there’s Ike heading towards Texas. Foremost among these at the moment, at least here in the United States, is very dangerous hurricane Ike, which gave a hard pounding to Cuba. Ike, is now heading into the Gulf of Mexico. Here’s the tracking map for Ike. Here’s the way the hurricane models are handling Ike as it takes aim on the Gulf coast….which looks more and more like it will make landfall on the southern Texas coast. Here’s a tracking map for the storm heading towards southern Baja, whose name is Lowell. Then in the western Pacific Ocean, we find Typhoon Sinlaku in the Philippine Sea, as well as newly formed tropical cyclone 16W. Here’s a tracking map for Sinlaku, and then one for 16W.

It’s early Tuesday evening here in Kihei, Maui, as I begin writing this last paragraph of today’s tropical weather narrative from Hawaii.  Tuesday was another great day, although clouds gathered thickly over some parts of both Maui and the Big Island. Showers fell locally, some of which were heavier than expected. Skies have cleared over Kihei, as I get ready to take the drive upcountry to Kula. As the trade winds get lighter and lighter as we move towards the weekend, we’ll see cloudy afternoons in the leeward areas, with those spotty showers breaking out most days. It will take having the trade winds getting stronger, after this coming weekend, to drive the showers back over to the windward sides again. I don’t know why, but my mind just shot ahead to the September full moon, which will occur next Monday. 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:

New studies of the Southern Ocean are revealing previously unknown features of giant spinning eddies that have a profound influence on marine life and on the world’s climate. These massive swirling structures — the largest are known as gyres – can be thousands of kilometres across and can extend down as deep as 500 metres or more, a research team led by a UNSW mathematician, Dr Gary Froyland, has shown in the latest study published in Physical Review Letters. "The water in the gyres does not mix well with the rest of the ocean, so for long periods these gyres can trap pollutants, nutrients, drifting plants and animals, and become physical barriers that divert even major ocean currents," Dr Froyland says. "In effect, they provide a kind of skeleton for global ocean flows. We’re only just beginning to get a grip on understanding their size, scale and functions, but we are sure that they have a major effect on marine biology and on the way that heat and carbon are distributed around the planet by the oceans."

One of the best known large-scale gyres in the world’s oceans is that associated with the Gulf Stream in the North Atlantic, notes fellow researcher Professor Matthew England, co-director of the UNSW Climate Change Research Centre. "This current pumps massive amounts of heat towards Europe, warming the atmosphere and giving the region a relatively mild climate: to see how important that is, you only have to compare Portugal‘s climate to that of Nova Scotia, in Canada, which as roughly the same latitude," says Professor England. "After releasing heat to the atmosphere the waters re-circulate toward the equator, where they regain heat and rejoin the flow into the Gulf Stream. In this way the ocean’s gyres play a fundamental role in pumping heat poleward, and cooler waters back to the tropics. This moderates the planet’s extremes in climate in a profound way, reducing the equator-to-pole temperature gradients that would otherwise persist on an ocean-free planet."

Interesting2:

The world is spending $300 billion every year to subsidize fossil fuels that pollute the air, wreck the climate … and run the world’s economy. So what if we, as taxpayers, stopped spending $300 billion on coal, oil and natural gas, and started spending it instead on wind, sun and water? That’s the question at the heart of a new report from the United Nations Environment Program, which concludes that eliminating fuel subsidies would not only reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but might just inspire new economic growth. (Further, it concludes that fossil fuels subsidies sold as a way to help the poor keep the lights on actually do more to help the rich.) “In the final analysis many fossil fuel subsidies are introduced for political reasons but are simply propping up and perpetuating inefficiencies in the global economy – they are thus part of the market failure that is climate change,” UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner said. Isn’t it remarkable how subversive the U.N. can be? The world spends about 0.7% of GDP on fossil fuel subsidies. The cost of curtailing carbon emissions to meet scientific goals by 2050 has been estimated at 1% of GDP. (The cost of not curtailing carbon emissions, measured in weather calamities, mass migrations and the like, could be 5-10% of GDP.)

The problem, of course, is that most nations are not willing to give up fossil fuels, their subsidies, or their profits. We focus on ourselves, and the addiction to oil we all admit to. But think about Russia, fat on oil wealth, and willing to thumb its nose at the international community. Can we reasonably expect that Russia will join in the latest United Nations talks, ongoing this week in Ghana, and agree to slash its carbon emissions? Russian fossil fuel subsidies, at $40 billion annually, are the largest on the planet, according to the U.N. report. Others that top the list: Iran, China, Saudi Arabia, India, Indonesia, Ukraine and Egypt. Wiping out oil subsidies, unfortunately, is akin to telling countries — many of them unwilling to listen to international opinion in the first place — not to act in their own national interest. Still, the U.N. report is telling: The cost of transforming an economy to run on renewable fuels always seems daunting, so ingrained are our dependencies on fossil fuels. But if you consider how much is spent to make those fossil fuels affordable in the first place, the price tag doesn’t look so daunting.

Interesting3:

Three words that invariably lead to a heated discussion in Canada are: "bulk water exports". For many this translates as "should Canada allow our clean water to be taken from our lakes and rivers and shipped to water wasteful United States leaving us high and dry?" The issue surfaced again recently when a Quebec think tank – the Montreal Economic Institute (MEI) released a paper – Freshwater exports for the development of Quebec’s blue gold arguing that large-scale exports of fresh water would be a wealth-creating idea for Quebec and for Canada. It concluded Quebec could generate $65-billion a year in gross revenue by exporting 10% of the one trillion cubic metres of "renewable fresh water" available to it each year, according to Marcel Boyer, MEI’s chief economist and vice-president.

That estimate was based on a price equal to 65 cents a cubic metre, that Boyer says is the cost to desalinate sea water. Even a royalty of just 10% would generate $6.5-billion a year in income. The implication is tat Quebec has water to spare – holding 3% of the world’s reserves of fresh water but using only 0.5% of its renewable reserves. Reaction was swift. "Canada’s precious fresh water resource belongs to the people and cannot be bundled and privatized at the whim of government and corporate interests," said Joe Cressy, campaign co-coordinator at Ottawa’s Polaris Institute. "Water is a fundamental human right and any attempt to divert or export it, whether to the U.S. or Saudi Arabia, must defer to what’s in the broad Canadian public interest," he added. "In a pre-election cycle there’s great pressure from corporations to allow the export of fresh water. If Quebec went ahead, other provinces would have to follow."

Interesting4:

Of all environments, space must be the most hostile: It is freezing cold, close to absolute zero, there is a vacuum, so no oxygen, and the amount of lethal radiation from stars is very high. This is why humans need to be carefully protected when they enter this environment. New research by Ingemar Jönsson and colleagues published in the September 9 issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press journal, shows that some animals —the so-called tardigrades or ‘water-bears’— are able to do away with space suits and can survive exposure to open-space vacuum, cold and radiation. This is the first time that any animal has been tested for survival under open-space conditions. The test subjects were chosen with great care: Tardigrades —also known as water-bears— are tiny invertebrate animals from 0.1 to 1.5mm in size that can be easily found on wet lichens and mosses. Because their homes often fall dry, tardigrades are very resistant to drying out and can resurrect after years of dryness. Along with this amazing survival trick comes extreme resistance to heat, cold and radiation —so tardigrades seemed like an ideal animal to test in space.