Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Wednesday afternoon:
Lihue, Kauai – 85 Honolulu, Oahu – 87 Kaneohe, Oahu – 84 Kahului, Maui – 86 Hilo, Hawaii – 84
Kailua-kona – 85 Air Temperaturesranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level, and on the taller mountains…at 4 p.m. Wednesday afternoon:
Barking Sands, Kauai – 87F Hilo, Hawaii– 79
Haleakala Crater- 46 (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 52 (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 Wednesday afternoon:
0.49 Mount Waialaele, Kauai
0.39 Oahu Forest NWR, Oahu
0.01 Molokai
0.00 Lanai 0.85 Kahoolawe 0.18 Ulupalakua, Maui
0.14 Honokaa, Big Island Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather mapshowing a 1026 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 Thursday and Friday. Satellite and Radar Images: To view the cloud conditions we have here in Hawaii, please use the following satellite links, starting off with theInfrared 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 animatedradar image.
Hawaii’s Mountains – Here’s a link to the live webcam on the summit of near 14,000 footMauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. The tallest peak on the island of Maui is theHaleakala 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
A perfect beach on Oahu…for a little sun bathing Photo Credit: flickr.com
The trade winds will gradually ease up through Friday, then fade away almost entirely over the weekend.We can look for lighter trades, although those typically windier areas will still find almost moderately strong breezes during the afternoon hours. Storms moving by far to the north of the islands this weekend will disrupt the trade winds Saturday and Sunday, making them almost non-existent…or very light at best. The computer models suggest that early next week, we’ll see the trade winds rebound…with freshening breezes by Tuesday into mid-week.
The trade winds will carry in a few showers to the windward sides, with a few afternoon showers along the leeward sides too.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 during the afternoon hours. 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. We have two active storms in the western Pacific, a weakening tropical storm in the eastern Pacific moving over the Baja Peninsula…and then there’s Ike heading towards the Texas coast.Foremost among these at the moment, at least here in the United States, is very dangerous hurricane Ike. This strengthening hurricane is moving across the very warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico…which in spots approaches 90F. Here’s the latest tracking map for Ike. Here’s a tracking map for the quickly weaening tropical depression heading towards southern Baja, whose name is Lowell. Then in the western Pacific Ocean, we find very strong Typhoon Sinlaku in the northern Philippine Sea, as well as tropical cyclone 16W. Here’s a tracking map for Sinlaku, and then one for 16W.
It’s early Wednesday evening here in Kula, Maui, as I begin writing this last paragraph of today’s tropical weather narrative from Hawaii.As was the case Tuesday afternoon, the lighter variety of trade winds, coupled with the daytime heating of the islands…caused clouds and showers to break out locally. This afternoon convective cloudiness was even more pronounced than Wednesday, with considerable cloudiness covering much of the Aloha state. There were some showers that fell locally, although most concentrated along the leeward upcountry slopes…which slipped down towards the coasts in places too. The downslope breezes this evening, along with the cooler temperatures after sunset, will help to evaporate most of the daytime clouds, leading to generally clear skies again by Thursday morning. We should see a repeat performance of this weather pattern each afternoon through the rest of this week.~~~When I left Kihei after work, it was lightly showering, and even though it wasn’t raining here in Kula when I got home, the steets were wet, so it had been showery earlier. 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:
Australia’s coastline is increasingly being battered by extreme waves that are driven in part by climate change, government scientists say. Research has shown that bigger waves are bearing down on the coastline as severe storms become more frequent. The waves could threaten communities with flooding and coastal erosion. The national science agency said a network of coastal observation sites should be established to monitor shifting wave patterns. Australia has always borne the brunt of nature’s extremes, from drought to bushfires and destructive tropical cyclones. Scientists from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) have identified an emerging threat – monstrous waves that have increasingly pummelled Australia’s southern shores. These ferocious conditions are associated with the passage of extra-tropical storms through the south of the continent. Researchers believe that a shifting climate could be partly to blame. They have said that Australia is vulnerable to an accelerated version of global warming, which is causing serious droughts and sudden severe storms. This vast, arid land was recently listed by the United Nations as a climate change "hotspot".
Interesting2:
With energy prices driving the cost of agricultural inputs up, nutrient-rich manure is getting another look. "Calls to Extension offices from people looking for manure and manure compost have increased in recent months," says Tommy Bass, Montana State University Extension livestock environment associate specialist. Bass said that this shift in perception is good for water quality, too. "As manure gains value, it is likely to be used more efficiently and effectively. There's a potential for increased revenue for animal feeding operations," he said. Though MSU Extension and conservation professionals have taught for years that manure can be a valuable asset, it's often written it off as a difficult-to-manage byproduct with cumbersome regulations.
Now, with fertilizer prices hovering at $1,000 per ton, the nitrogen and other nutrients in manure look more gold than brown. Bass said that a ton of manure contains between $30 to $40 dollars worth of nutrients for the soil, though they're not all available the first year. "Expect a quarter to a half of the nitrogen to be available in the first season," he said, "The remainder is partially available the next year and partially lost to the atmosphere." Fresh scraped and stacked dairy and beef manure can have a total nitrogen content ranging between 12 and 25 pounds of nitrogen per ton of manure, while the same ton may also have 9 to 18 pounds of phosphorus fertilizer equivalent.
Interesting3:
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are continuing their march toward creating a synthetic, gecko-like adhesive, one sticky step at a time. Their latest milestone is the first adhesive that cleans itself after each use without the need for water or chemicals, much like the remarkable hairs found on the gecko lizard's toes. "It brings us closer to being able to build truly all-terrain robots, which will in the future be able to scamper up walls and across ceilings in everyday environments rather than only on clean glass," said Ron Fearing, UC Berkeley professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences and head of the research team developing the new material. "We can envision robots being able to go anywhere they are needed, perhaps in the search for survivors after a disaster." The adhesive's development is reported online today (Wednesday, Sept. 10) in Langmuir, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Chemical Society that covers a wide range of topics, including surface properties, nanostructures and biomimetic materials.
For years, scientists have been trying to develop a man-made version of the toe hairs that make the lizard's acrobatic feats possible. Earlier this year, Fearing's group developed another gecko-inspired adhesive using polymer microfibers that could easily attach to and detach from clean surfaces. But researchers said replicating the gecko's ability to walk through dirty surfaces yet keep its feet clean enough to climb walls has been tricky. In 2005, research led by Kellar Autumn, associate professor of biology at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore., and one of the nation's leading experts on gecko biomechanics, revealed for the first time that a gecko keeps its feet sticky but clean by shedding dirt particles with every step. "It goes completely against our everyday experience with sticky tapes, which are 'magnets' for dirt and can't be reused," said Fearing. "With our gecko adhesive, we have been able to create the first material that is adhesive and yet cleans itself a little bit with every contact."
Interesting4:
To slow global warming, install white roofs…it just makes good sense. Such roofs and reflective pavement in the world's 100 largest cities would have a massive cooling effect, according to data released at California 's annual Climate Change Research Conference. Builders have known for decades that white roofs reflect the sun's rays and lower the cost of air conditioning. But now scientists say they have quantified a new benefit: slowing global warming. If the 100 biggest cities in the world installed white roofs and changed their pavement to more reflective materials -- say, concrete instead of asphalt-based material -- the global cooling effect would be massive, according to data released Tuesday at California 's annual Climate Change Research Conference in Sacramento . Since 2005, the Golden State has required that flat commercial structures have white roofs. Next year, new and retrofitted residential and commercial buildings, with both flat and sloped roofs, will have to install heat-reflecting roofing, as part of an energy-efficient building code. But the state has yet to pass any rules to encourage cooler pavement on its roads, which are largely coated with heat-absorbing asphalt, a cheap byproduct of oil refining.
Interesting5:From Holland, the country famous for its wind mills, comes a new design for home wind power. Looking like an eggbeater, it spins quieter and at lower wind speeds than a lot of traditional propeller-type turbines. It's now standard for big wind turbines to have propeller blades. Much of the turning force is generated at the tips, which slice perpendicularly through the air, causing a swooshing noise that some residents nearby have said they find unnerving. By contrast, the so-called Energy Ball, sold by Dutch-based Home Energy International, has rotors bent around in a ball shape so that they primarily move parallel to the wind. This generates less noise. "A small wind turbine has to be silent, otherwise it will be annoying to the community," said Erik Aurik, Home Energy's marketing manager. The noise from an Energy Ball is always less than the sound of the wind, Aurik told LiveScience. And what's more, the device continues to work even when the wind speed dips down to as slow as 4.5 mph (2 meters per second), whereas the average turbine needs roughly twice that wind speed to turn.
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 Temperaturesranged 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 mapshowing 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 theInfrared 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 animatedradar image.
Hawaii’s Mountains – Here’s a link to the live webcam on the summit of near 14,000 footMauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. The tallest peak on the island of Maui is theHaleakala 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.
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:
Threewords 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.
Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Monday afternoon:
Lihue, Kauai – 85
Honolulu, Oahu – 87 Kaneohe, Oahu – 85 Kahului, Maui – 88 Hilo, Hawaii – 84
Kailua-kona – 84 Air Temperaturesranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level, and on the taller mountains…at 4 p.m. Monday afternoon:
Port Allen, Kauai -90F Kaneohe, Oahu– 80
Haleakala Crater- 46 (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 45 (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:
0.35 Wailua, Kauai
0.06 Dillingham, Oahu
0.01 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.01 Kahoolawe 0.32 Oheo Gulch, Maui 0.54 Mountain View, Big Island Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather mapshowing a 1030 millibar high pressure system located far to the northeast of Hawaii…with its associated ridge now weakening to our north. This pressure configuration will prompt our local trade winds to be lighter Tuesday and Wednesday, 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 theInfrared 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 animatedradar image.
Hawaii’s Mountains – Here’s a link to the live webcam on the summit of near 14,000 footMauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. The tallest peak on the island of Maui is theHaleakala 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
Remote north shore beach on Kauai Photo Credit: flickr.com
Our light to locally moderate trade wind flow will continue for the time being…although getting lighter soon through the rest of this week.The trade winds won’t go away completely, but just become lighter by mid-week. There will be daytime sea breezes in those areas that are more sheltered from the trade winds. The reason our local trade winds will be losing some strength, is due to the weakening of our high pressure ridge to the north of the islands. The forecast models show no significant increase in our local trade winds through the next week.
There will be a few showers, although generally on the light side, falling along the windward sides…and in the leeward areas at times during the afternoons too.The overlying atmosphere remains stable enough, that whatever showers that do manage to fall, will remain rather insignificant. There are still no organized rainmakers on the weather horizon at this time…suggesting fair weather will prevail well into the future. There are several menacing tropical cyclones churning the world’s tropical oceans now.Foremost among those is dangerous hurricane Ike, which is giving a beating to Cuba. Ike, which is a strong hurricane, is on its way into the Gulf of Mexico. Here’s the tracking map for Ike, which is a very dangerous storm. By the way, here’s the way the hurricane models are handling Ike as it takes aim on somewhere along the Gulf coast. Then we have tropical storm Lowell in the eastern Pacific, which is heading towards the southern Baja coast…here’s a tracking map. Then in the western Pacific Ocean, we find tropical storm Sinlaku in the Philippine Sea as well, which will move by Luzon Island, offshore to the east…with a tracking map.
It’s early Monday evening here in Kihei, Maui, as I begin writing this last paragraph of today’s tropical weather narrative from Hawaii.Monday was yet another of these near perfect, late summer days…that are often found during the month of September. There was hardly any precipitation, and there was enough of a trade wind flow, that air temperatures felt very warm but not necessarily hot. The leeward beaches were the warmest areas, as usual. The trade winds remained active Monday afternoon, with the top gust at 33 mph (5pm), at those blustery Maalaea Bay on Maui. I see no reason to believe that anything other than more nice weather will prevail through the end of this week, and likely right on into the early part of next week. 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:
The world must speed up the deployment of solar power as it has the potential to meet all the world’s energy needs, the chairman of an industry gathering which wrapped up Friday in Spain said. "The solar energy resource is enormous, and distributed all over the world, in all countries and also oceans," said Daniel Lincot, the chairman of the five-day European Photovoltaic Solar Energy conference held in Valencia. "There is thus an enormous resource available from photovoltaics, which can be used everywhere, and can in principle cover all the world energy demand from a renewable, safe and clean source," he added. Lincot, the research director of the Paris-based Institute for Research and Development of Photovoltaic Energy, said solar energy was growing rapidly but still made only a "negligible" contribution to total energy supply.
Last year the world production of photovoltaic models represented a surface of 40 square kilometres (16 square miles) while meeting the electrical consumption of countries like France or Germany would require 5,000 square kilometres, he said. Under current scenarios, photovoltaic models will represent about 1,000 square kilometres by 2020 accounting for about only 3.0 percent of energy needs in the 27-member European Union, he added. Over 200 scientists and solar power experts have signed a declaration calling on the accelerated deployment of photovoltaic power which was launched at the conference. More than 3,500 experts and 715 sector firms took part in the gathering, billed as the largest conference ever organised in the field of photovoltaic conversion of solar energy. Germany and Spain are the world leaders in solar energy power. Germany has 4,000 megawatts of installed capacity while Spain has 600 megawatts.
Interesting2:
A new set of United Nations laws may be needed to regulate new Arctic industries such as shipping and oil exploration as climate change melts the ice around the North Pole, legal experts said on Sunday. They said existing laws governing everything from fish stocks to bio-prospecting by pharmaceutical companies were inadequate for the polar regions, especially the Arctic, where the area of summer sea ice is now close to a 2007 record low. "Many experts believe this new rush to the polar regions is not manageable within existing international law," said A.H. Zakri, Director of the U.N.University‘s Yokohama-based Institute of Advanced Studies. Fabled shipping passages along the north coast of Russia and Canada, normally clogged by thick ice, have both thawed this summer, raising the possibility of short-cut routes between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
Dozens of legal experts are meeting in Iceland from September 7-9 to debate the legal needs of the polar regions. Other threats include a surge in tourism, with 40,000 visitors to Antarctica in 2007 against just 1,000 in 1987. Many legal specialists believe there is a lack of clarity in existing laws about shipping, mining, sharing of fish stocks drawn northwards by the melting of ice, and standards for clearing up any oil spills far from land. "Oil in particular and risks of shipping in the Arctic are big issues. It’s incredibly difficult to clean up an oil spill on ice," said conference chairman David Leary of the Institute of Advanced Studies, which is organizing the conference with Iceland‘s University of Akureyri.
Interesting3: Wide rivers of ice, called ice streams, flow through relatively slow-moving polar ice sheets, en route to the sea. Glaciologists had assumed that ice streams just creep steadily along—until one was recently shown to pack a powerful one-two punch, generating seismic waves twice a day. The seismic signals from Antarctica‘s 60-mile-wide Whillans Ice Stream are as strong as those of a magnitude-7 earthquake, which could cause major damage in a developed area. But, whereas an earthquake of magnitude 7 might last 10 seconds, the Whillans signals continue for ten minutes or longer. They resemble earthquakes at glacial speed, says Douglas A. Wiens of WashingtonUniversity in St. Louis. [Because of the relatively long time over which the slip takes place, scientists standing right on the slipping ice stream feel nothing. In contrast, most rock earthquakes, which can take place in as little as a few seconds, are felt intensely by people in the area.
Interesting4:
The U.S. bottled water market is slowing down after years of steady growth, suggesting that international awareness campaigns may be curbing consumer demand. While bottled water continues to expand in global popularity, the U.S. market is expected to grow 6.7 percent this year, the smallest increase this decade, according to data collected by the Beverage Marketing Corporation. The United States is the largest consumer of bottled water, but opposition is growing. In the past year, several restaurants, municipalities, natural food stores, and schools are deciding to "buy local" – choosing tap water rather than packaged products – for economic, environmental, or social justice reasons.
Bottled water sold in most industrialized countries costs between $500 and $1,000 per cubic meter, compared to $0.50 for municipal water in states such as California, according to Pacific Institute President Peter Gleick. Meanwhile, more than 40 percent of water bottled in the United States comes from public water supplies, and studies suggest that bottled water is not always cleaner than tap water. The bottled products also demand significant amounts of energy to be produced, packaged, stored, and transported. While cities recycle about 23 percent of their plastic bottles, some 2 million tons of the bottles are sent to landfills each year, the Worldwatch Institute reported in 2007. Corporate Accountability International estimates that the annual cost of disposing of water bottles is $70 million. These concerns are beginning to cause a shift in consumer choices.
Interesting5:
Valleys on Mars were carved over long periods by recurring floods at a time when Mars might have had wet and dry seasons much like some of Earth’s deserts, a new study suggests. The research contradicts other suggestions that the large valley networks on the red planet were the result of short-lived catastrophic flooding, lasting just hundreds to a few thousand years and perhaps triggered by asteroid impacts. The new modeling suggests wet periods lasted at least 10,000 years. "Precipitation on Mars lasted a long time – it wasn’t a brief interval of massive deluges," said study leader Charles Barnhart, a graduate student in Earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "Our results argue for liquid water being stable at the surface of Mars for prolonged periods in the past."
NASA planetary scientist Jeffrey Moore and Alan Howard of the University of Virginia contributed to the research, which will be detailed in the Journal of Geophysical Research – Planets. In recent years, pictures of Mars have revealed a landscape clearly shaped by runoff. Most researchers now see water as a key player, though carbon dioxide has also been put forth as a possible culprit. A recent study of BoxCanyon in Idaho concluded that similar features on Mars could have been sculpted by ancient megafloods. Whatever, Mars is bone-dry today, and it’s not clear just how wet it was in the past. The new work, based on computer models, paints a picture of ancient Mars, more than 3.5 billion years ago, as looking somewhat like the deserts of the U.S. Southwest, sans cacti of course.
Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Sunday afternoon:
Lihue, Kauai – 86 Honolulu, Oahu – 88 Kaneohe, Oahu – 85 Kahului, Maui – 86 Hilo, Hawaii – 84
Kailua-kona – 85 Air Temperaturesranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level, and on the taller mountains…at 6 p.m. Sunday evening:
Barking Sands, Kauai-86F Hilo, Hawaii– 78
Haleakala Crater- 45 (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 37 (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 Sunday afternoon:
0.27 Mount Waialaele, Kauai
0.19 South Fork Kaukonahua, Oahu
0.04 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.08 Kahoolawe 0.68 Puu Kukui, Maui
0.34 Honaunau, Big Island Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather mapshowing a 1031 millibar high pressure system located far to the northeast of Hawaii…with its associated ridge now weakening to our north. This pressure configuration will prompt our local trade winds to be fairly light through Tuesday, although 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 theInfrared 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 animatedradar image.
Hawaii’s Mountains – Here’s a link to the live webcam on the summit of near 14,000 footMauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. The tallest peak on the island of Maui is theHaleakala 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 summits of the West Maui Mountains on Maui Photo Credit: flickr.com
The trade winds will remain light to moderately strong for the time being, getting lighter by Tuesday and Wednesday.September is a month that usually has the trade winds blowing, as our high pressure system, the source of our local trade winds, remains in it’s more or less late summertime position…northeast of here. This weather map, shows a high pressure system, now weighing-in at 1031 millibars, located far to the northeast…offshore from the Oregon coast. A ridge coming out of the high pressure cell, extending to the north of our islands, will keep the trade winds blowing. The forecast models suggest our trade winds will continue active, although generally on the light side of the wind spectrum going into the new week ahead…then picking up some by mid-week onward.
A dry and stable atmosphere over the Hawaiian Islands, will keep any showers on the light side.The fairly typical trade wind inversion is acting to cap the cloud tops in our area, keeping our surrounding cumulus and stratocumulus clouds from becoming vertically enhanced. These clouds for the most part, will remain fairly light rainfall producers at best. As thissatellite imageshows, there are some clouds being carried towards the state on the trades. As the winds calm down starting Tuesday, we may see an increase in clouds over and around the leeward sides, and especially over the upslope areas Tuesday and Wednesday. A new tropical cyclone named Lowell, has formed recently in the eastern Pacific.Meanwhile, we have dangerous hurricane Ike, which has given a powerful strike to Cuba. Ike, which is a strong hurricane, is on its way into the Gulf of Mexico. Here’s the tracking map for Ike, which is a very dangerous storm. By the way, here’s the way the hurricane models are handling Ike as it takes aim on somewhere along the Gulf coast!
It’s early Sunday evening here in Kula, Maui, as I begin writing this last paragraph of today’s tropical weather narrative from Hawaii.As the information above describes, rather dry weather will prevail, with just light to locally moderate trade winds blowing for the time being. Our generally fair weather will remain in place well into the future. I took the trip over to the Lahaina side early Sunday morning, and found good waves breaking…I got some nice rides. The wind wasn’t a problem, and the crowds, at least where I surfed, weren’t much of a problem either. I understand that the waves were quite a bit larger on Saturday, which means that it was just as well that I didn’t get over that way then. I came back home right after surfing, and have hung out here all day, which was a great treat. I found myself being a couch potato during the afternoon, which was fine with me. I don’t have a TV, so I just took the opportunity to read, and cat napping a few times too. I’ll be back very early Monday morning with your next new weather narrative. I hope you have a great Sunday night until then! Aloha for now…Glenn.
Interesting:
Asian pollution from Asian power plants, cooking and heating could create summer hot spots in the central United States and southern Europe by mid-century, U.S. climate scientists reported on Thursday. Unlike the long-lived greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, the particle and gas pollution cited in this report only stays in the air for a few days or weeks but its warming effect on the climate half a world away could last for decades, the scientists said. "We found that these short-lived pollutants have a greater influence on the Earth’s climate throughout the 21st century than previously thought," said Hiram "Chip" Levy of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "By 2050, two of the three climate models we use found that changes in short-lived pollutants will contribute 20 percent of the predicted global warming." By 2100, that figure goes up to 25 percent, Levy said in a telephone briefing. The short-lived pollution that can cause long-term warming comes from soot, also known as the black carbon particles that result from fires, and sulfate particles, which are emitted by power plants. Soot particles are dark and absorb heat; sulfates are light and reflect heat, actually cooling things down.
Asian soot and sulfate pollution is likely to make for hotter, drier summers in the American Midwest and the Mediterranean region of southern Europe, Levy said, adding that heating and drying effects are not expected to hit Asia. The reason for the expected pollution-related warming trend is that sulfate pollution, which has been linked to respiratory problems, is expected to decrease dramatically while soot pollution is forecast to continue increasing in Asia. Ground-level ozone emitted by U.S. transport vehicles is also a factor, the scientists said. These pollutants have usually been dealt with as threats to air quality, but should also be considered for their impact on climate change, said Drew Shindell, a climate expert at NASA. Carbon dioxide, which spurs global warming and is emitted from natural and human-made sources, still is going to dominate the climate change picture in the coming century, but because modern societies are built to emit lots of this substance, change is likely to be slow, Shindell said. Targeting these air pollutants now makes sense, because of their role in the quality of the air people breathe as well as their impact on global warming, he said.
Interesting2:
Satellite imagery released earlier this week provided further evidence that deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon region accelerated dramatically this year. Between August 2007 and July 2008, 8,147 square kilometers of the Brazilian Amazon were cleared, according to the country’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE). This is an area more than twice the size of the U.S. state of Rhode Island. The expanse of deforested land is about 69 percent greater than last year, when 4,820 square kilometers were removed. "We’re not content," Brazilian Environment Minister Carlos Minc told The Associated Press. "Deforestation has to fall more and the conditions for sustainable development have to improve." Last year’s deforestation numbers, however, were the lowest since recording began in the 1970s. The amount of forest cleared this year, while still substantial, is also less than previous years.
As world leaders debate a new international agreement on climate change, preservation of the vast Amazon forest, which stores large amounts of carbon, has been identified as a necessary step to avoid accelerated warming. The Brazilian government has taken additional steps in recent months to curb illegal logging, but a growing global market for beef and soybeans encourages the deforestation. The diverse Amazon forest contains one in ten of the world’s known species and enough vegetation to absorb an estimated 10 percent of atmospheric carbon dioxide, not including oceanic carbon sinks. Since the 1970s, about 20 percent of the Amazon forest has been cut, leaving mainly open fields with little diversity in its place. Illegal deforestation reached its peak this year between August 2007 and April, when satellite images observed about 84 percent of the year’s deforestation.
Interesting3:
The Rosetta deep space probe successfully passed close to an asteroid 250 million miles from Earth, the European Space Agency said Friday night. In a mission that may bring man closer to solving the mystery of the solar system’s birth, the craft completed its flyby of the Steins asteroid, also known as Asteroid 2867 — now in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter — at around 3:15 p.m. EDT. As planned, the spacecraft’s signal was lost for about 90 minutes as engineers turned it away from the sun and because the craft was moving too fast for its antennas to transmit. The resumption of the craft’s signal transmission was greeted with cheers from ESA engineers and technicians. "We’re extremely happy that it worked," mission manager Gerhard Schwehm said, sipping a glass of champagne after the announcement from the control room. "It’s a big relief. People can relax a bit now and everything seems fine." Schwehm said the agency would work to get images and other data collected by the probe processed as soon as possible.
He said the first images should be released to the public Saturday. "The operation went very well," Paolo Ferri, the head of the solar and planetary missions division and Rosetta flight operations director, said in a short speech after the announcement. "The spacecraft is in exactly the condition we expected, which is good. All indications are that everything was super successful." The timing of the flyby meant the asteroid was illuminated by the sun, making it likely the transmitted images will be clear and sharp for scientists working on the origins of the solar system. "Dead rocks can say a lot," Schwehm said. Astronomers have had to work with limited data from previous passes of asteroids, such as when ESA’s Giotto probe swept by Halley’s Comet in 1986, photographing long canyons, broad craters and 3,000-foot hills. Steins was Rosetta’s first scientific target as flies in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter en route to its main destination, the comet 67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which is scheduled for 2014. The probe was launched in March 2004.
Interesting4:
There’s a mushroom boom in the wet woods of the Northeast this summer. Hillsides bloom with black trumpets. Disc-shaped mushrooms called artist’s conch sprout from tree trunks. Forests are laced with tasty chanterelles giving off faint whiffs of apricot and with a pretty but deadly variety called destroying angels. "For the last two summers we’ve had lousy crops of mushrooms because it was too hot and it was too dry," agroforester Bob Beyfuss said during a recent ramble through a Catskill forest. Not so during this season of soaking rains. Beyfuss found caps sprouting from the forest floor practically behind every tree. Rainfall has been well above average around New York and New England this summer, with some areas hit with twice as much precipitation from July 1 through Aug. 18, according to the Northeast Regional Climate Center at CornellUniversity.
Rain is fungus fuel, and it has helped along a bumper crop for mushrooms that is expected to last into the fall foraging season. "It’s been the best summer since 1989," said Russ Cohen, a veteran forager from the Boston area who hunts around the Northeast. Cohen said porcini mushrooms have been particularly easy to find this year. He added that chanterelles, a horn-shaped mushroom popular with foragers, have been notably larger. In New York‘s northern Catskills, Beyfuss, who works at the Cornell Cooperative Extension Agroforestry Resource Center, left the woods on a recent tour with a baseball cap full of black trumpets and a plump chanterelle.
Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Saturday afternoon:
Lihue, Kauai – 84 Honolulu, Oahu – 88 Kaneohe, Oahu – 84 Kahului, Maui – 88 Hilo, Hawaii – 83
Kailua-kona – 86 Air Temperaturesranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level, and on the taller mountains…at 4 p.m. Saturday afternoon:
Kapalua, Maui-86F Hilo, Hawaii– 76
Haleakala Crater- 52 (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – missing (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:
0.42 Mount Waialaele, Kauai
0.26 Nuuanu upper, Oahu
0.01 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.09 Kahoolawe 0.36 West Wailuaiki, Maui
0.21 Glenwood, Big Island Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather mapshowing a 1029 millibar high pressure system located far to the northeast of Hawaii. At the same time we find several low pressure systems, with their associated cold front, pushing the high pressure cell’s ridge down closer to our islands. This pressure configuration will prompt our local trade winds to be somewhat lighter Saturday…then picking up some Sunday. Satellite and Radar Images: To view the cloud conditions we have here in Hawaii, please use the following satellite links, starting off with theInfrared 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 animatedradar image.
Hawaii’s Mountains – Here’s a link to the live webcam on the summit of near 14,000 footMauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. The tallest peak on the island of Maui is theHaleakala 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.
The trade winds have slowed down a little, and will likely remain somewhat lighter than normal in the new week ahead.September is a month that usually has the trade winds blowing, as our high pressure system, the source of our local trade winds, remains in it’s more or less late summertime position…northeast of here. This weather map, shows a high pressure system, now weighing-in at 1029 millibars, located far to the northeast…still offshore from the Oregon coast. The orange zigzag line coming out of the base of this anticyclone, is the ridge, which extends the trade winds out of the mid-latitudes, down here into the tropics. This ridge however has been displaced southward more than normal. The forecast models suggest our trade winds will continue blowing, although generally on the light side of the wind spectrum.
In terms of precipitation, there shouldn’t be very much, given the dry and stable atmospherics overlying the Hawaiian Islands at the moment.The fairly typical trade wind inversion is acting to cap the cloud tops in our area, keeping our surrounding cumulus and stratocumulus clouds from becoming vertically enhanced. Thin clouds, or what are often called pancake-like clouds, usually provide only light amounts of moisture below them. These clouds, for the most part will remain fairly benign rain producers. As this daytime visiblesatellite imagefrom the Navy shows, there are some clouds being carried towards the state. These may drop a few light showers, but again, nothing heavy. As this loopingradar imageshows, nothing serious is taking aim on our islands. A new tropical cyclone named Lowell, has formed recently in the eastern Pacific.We have two tropical systems: Ike, and Hanna in the Atlantic and Caribbean Sea…which is much bigger news. Here’s a graphical map, showing these storms. The first, tropical storm Hanna, is racing up the eastern seaboard, bringing gusty winds and heavy duty rainfall…here’s a tracking map. Then Ike, which is a strong hurricane, will give a powerful blow to Cuba, on its way into the Gulf of Mexico. Here’s the tracking map for Ike, which is a very dangerous storm. By the way, here’s the way the hurricane models are handling Ike as it takes aim on somewhere along the Gulf coast! Josephine has fizzling out over open ocean.
It’s early Saturday evening here in Kula, Maui, as I begin writing this last paragraph of today’s tropical weather narrative from Hawaii.As the information above describes, rather dry weather will prevail, with just light to locally moderate trade winds blowing for the time being. Friday evening after work I went to see the new film called Bangkok Dangerous (2008), starring Nicholas Cage, among others, who I don’t recognize any of their names. A short synopsis of this film, which is getting only average (or less) ratings, is about a cold-blooded hit man who heads to Bangkok to pull off four jobs, and winds up falling in love with a local girl, and bonding with his errand boy. Despite the very dire nature of this film, I ended up liking it quite a bit. There was the killing, quite a bit of that in fact, although somehow it wasn’t all that unsettling. It was full of the action that somehow pulls me in so strongly, along with a story that eventually gave the hit man, Nicholas Cage, a heart after all. Like many of the films that I’m drawn to see, it’s a scary world there, full of things happening that would scare me to death, perhaps that’s why it’s so interesting to see…poking your head into a reality that you’d never want to be in during real life! Here’s a trailerfor this film, if you are interested in taking a look. Saturday has been a nice day, although a bit on the hot and humid side around the edges, and especially down near the leeward beaches…where the winds are lightest. I expect Saturday night to remain fair, with more good late summer weather to continue through Sunday. Actually, I still don’t see any inclement weather conditions visiting the Hawaiian Islands well into the future! I hope you have a great Saturday night, I’ll be back Sunday morning with the next new weather narrative from paradise. Aloha for now…Glenn.
Interesting:
Asian pollution from Asian power plants, cooking and heating could create summer hot spots in the central United States and southern Europe by mid-century, U.S. climate scientists reported on Thursday. Unlike the long-lived greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, the particle and gas pollution cited in this report only stays in the air for a few days or weeks but its warming effect on the climate half a world away could last for decades, the scientists said. "We found that these short-lived pollutants have a greater influence on the Earth’s climate throughout the 21st century than previously thought," said Hiram "Chip" Levy of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "By 2050, two of the three climate models we use found that changes in short-lived pollutants will contribute 20 percent of the predicted global warming." By 2100, that figure goes up to 25 percent, Levy said in a telephone briefing. The short-lived pollution that can cause long-term warming comes from soot, also known as the black carbon particles that result from fires, and sulfate particles, which are emitted by power plants. Soot particles are dark and absorb heat; sulfates are light and reflect heat, actually cooling things down.
Asian soot and sulfate pollution is likely to make for hotter, drier summers in the American Midwest and the Mediterranean region of southern Europe, Levy said, adding that heating and drying effects are not expected to hit Asia. The reason for the expected pollution-related warming trend is that sulfate pollution, which has been linked to respiratory problems, is expected to decrease dramatically while soot pollution is forecast to continue increasing in Asia. Ground-level ozone emitted by U.S. transport vehicles is also a factor, the scientists said. These pollutants have usually been dealt with as threats to air quality, but should also be considered for their impact on climate change, said Drew Shindell, a climate expert at NASA. Carbon dioxide, which spurs global warming and is emitted from natural and human-made sources, still is going to dominate the climate change picture in the coming century, but because modern societies are built to emit lots of this substance, change is likely to be slow, Shindell said. Targeting these air pollutants now makes sense, because of their role in the quality of the air people breathe as well as their impact on global warming, he said.
Interesting2:
Satellite imagery released earlier this week provided further evidence that deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon region accelerated dramatically this year. Between August 2007 and July 2008, 8,147 square kilometers of the Brazilian Amazon were cleared, according to the country’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE). This is an area more than twice the size of the U.S. state of Rhode Island. The expanse of deforested land is about 69 percent greater than last year, when 4,820 square kilometers were removed. "We’re not content," Brazilian Environment Minister Carlos Minc told The Associated Press. "Deforestation has to fall more and the conditions for sustainable development have to improve." Last year’s deforestation numbers, however, were the lowest since recording began in the 1970s. The amount of forest cleared this year, while still substantial, is also less than previous years.
As world leaders debate a new international agreement on climate change, preservation of the vast Amazon forest, which stores large amounts of carbon, has been identified as a necessary step to avoid accelerated warming. The Brazilian government has taken additional steps in recent months to curb illegal logging, but a growing global market for beef and soybeans encourages the deforestation. The diverse Amazon forest contains one in ten of the world’s known species and enough vegetation to absorb an estimated 10 percent of atmospheric carbon dioxide, not including oceanic carbon sinks. Since the 1970s, about 20 percent of the Amazon forest has been cut, leaving mainly open fields with little diversity in its place. Illegal deforestation reached its peak this year between August 2007 and April, when satellite images observed about 84 percent of the year’s deforestation.
Interesting3:
The Rosetta deep space probe successfully passed close to an asteroid 250 million miles from Earth, the European Space Agency said Friday night. In a mission that may bring man closer to solving the mystery of the solar system’s birth, the craft completed its flyby of the Steins asteroid, also known as Asteroid 2867 — now in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter — at around 3:15 p.m. EDT. As planned, the spacecraft’s signal was lost for about 90 minutes as engineers turned it away from the sun and because the craft was moving too fast for its antennas to transmit. The resumption of the craft’s signal transmission was greeted with cheers from ESA engineers and technicians. "We’re extremely happy that it worked," mission manager Gerhard Schwehm said, sipping a glass of champagne after the announcement from the control room. "It’s a big relief. People can relax a bit now and everything seems fine." Schwehm said the agency would work to get images and other data collected by the probe processed as soon as possible.
He said the first images should be released to the public Saturday. "The operation went very well," Paolo Ferri, the head of the solar and planetary missions division and Rosetta flight operations director, said in a short speech after the announcement. "The spacecraft is in exactly the condition we expected, which is good. All indications are that everything was super successful." The timing of the flyby meant the asteroid was illuminated by the sun, making it likely the transmitted images will be clear and sharp for scientists working on the origins of the solar system. "Dead rocks can say a lot," Schwehm said. Astronomers have had to work with limited data from previous passes of asteroids, such as when ESA’s Giotto probe swept by Halley’s Comet in 1986, photographing long canyons, broad craters and 3,000-foot hills. Steins was Rosetta’s first scientific target as flies in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter en route to its main destination, the comet 67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which is scheduled for 2014. The probe was launched in March 2004.
Interesting4:
There’s a mushroom boom in the wet woods of the Northeast this summer. Hillsides bloom with black trumpets. Disc-shaped mushrooms called artist’s conch sprout from tree trunks. Forests are laced with tasty chanterelles giving off faint whiffs of apricot and with a pretty but deadly variety called destroying angels. "For the last two summers we’ve had lousy crops of mushrooms because it was too hot and it was too dry," agroforester Bob Beyfuss said during a recent ramble through a Catskill forest. Not so during this season of soaking rains. Beyfuss found caps sprouting from the forest floor practically behind every tree. Rainfall has been well above average around New York and New England this summer, with some areas hit with twice as much precipitation from July 1 through Aug. 18, according to the Northeast Regional Climate Center at CornellUniversity.
Rain is fungus fuel, and it has helped along a bumper crop for mushrooms that is expected to last into the fall foraging season. "It’s been the best summer since 1989," said Russ Cohen, a veteran forager from the Boston area who hunts around the Northeast. Cohen said porcini mushrooms have been particularly easy to find this year. He added that chanterelles, a horn-shaped mushroom popular with foragers, have been notably larger. In New York‘s northern Catskills, Beyfuss, who works at the Cornell Cooperative Extension Agroforestry Resource Center, left the woods on a recent tour with a baseball cap full of black trumpets and a plump chanterelle.
Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Friday afternoon:
Lihue, Kauai – 85 Honolulu, Oahu – 90 Kaneohe, Oahu – 79 Kahului, Maui – 89 Hilo, Hawaii – 86
Kailua-kona – 84 Air Temperaturesranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level, and on the taller mountains…at 5 p.m. Friday evening:
Port Allen, Kauai– 88F Kahului, Maui– 80
Haleakala Crater- 54 (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 45 (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 Friday afternoon:
0.15 Mount Waialeale, Kauai
0.21 Oahu Forest NWR, Oahu
0.05 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.00 Kahoolawe 0.60 Oheo Gulch, Maui
0.16 Upolu airport, Big Island Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather mapshowing a 1029 millibar high pressure system located far to the northeast of Hawaii. At the same time we find several low pressure systems, with their associated cold front, pushing the high pressure cell’s ridge down closer to our islands. This pressure configuration will prompt our local trade winds to be lighter through Saturday…then picking up some Sunday. Satellite and Radar Images: To view the cloud conditions we have here in Hawaii, please use the following satellite links, starting off with theInfrared 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 animatedradar image.
Hawaii’s Mountains – Here’s a link to the live webcam on the summit of near 14,000 footMauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. The tallest peak on the island of Maui is theHaleakala 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
Remote sandy beach on Kauai Photo Credit: flickr.com
The trade winds will stay relatively light through Saturday, then pick up Sunday through Monday or Tuesday…only to get softer again through much of the new week ahead.As this weather map shows, we have a 1029 millibar high pressure system far northeast of our islands Friday night…well offshore from the northern California/southern Oregon coast. There are several low pressure systems to the north-northwest, with a cold front in the middle latitudes of the north central Pacific. These areas of low pressure will push the high pressure ridge, to the north of Hawaii, southward towards our islands over the next couple of days. This in turn has softened our local winds, giving a somewhat muggy feeling to our atmosphere near the beaches. By the way, the cold front won’t be able to push down into our tropical latitudes…remaining far to the northwest of our Hawaiian Islands. The computer models suggest that later this weekend, into early next week, our trade winds will boost back into the light to moderately strong levels again briefly…only to falter again by mid-week. This lighter wind regime next week will bring an extended of fairly sultry weather as we move through this late summer period.
The majority of whatever showers that fall, will take aim on the leeward areas during the afternoons now…especially in the upslope sections of Maui and the Big Island, although the other islands too. The lighter trade winds through Saturday will prompt this increase in afternoon upcountry showers falling locally…light ones though. The bias for showers will return to the windward sides later this weekend into early next week, as the trade winds become better established then. The overlying atmosphere is quite dry and stable at the moment, so that we shouldn’t see heavy showers falling. There are still no organized rain makers in our vicinity, so that fair weather will prevail. As usual, and depending upon the amount of upstream cloudiness, there will be fairly minor variations in showers arriving along our windward coasts and slopes…generally though most generous during the night and early morning hours. As this satellite image shows, there are lines of incoming clouds, the closest is paralleling the windward sides of the Big Island and Maui…although they look relatively benign in terms of being rainfall producers. There are no tropical cyclones here in the Pacific Ocean, with all the action happening over in the Caribbean Sea, and the Atlantic Ocean now.We still have three tropical storms: Josephine, Ike, and Hanna in the Atlantic and Caribbean Sea. Here’s a graphical map, showing these storms. The first in line, tropical storm Hanna, is racing up the eastern seaboard, bringing gusty winds and heavy duty rainfall…here’s a tracking map. Then Ike, which is a strong hurricane, will slam through the Bahamas, clipping Cuba, on its way into the Gulf of Mexico. Here’s the tracking map for Ike, which is a very dangerous storm. By the way, here’s the way the hurricane models are handling Ike as it takes aim on somewhere along the Gulf coast! Josephine is still too far away to know what she will eventually do.
It’s early Friday evening here in Kihei, Maui, as I begin writing this last paragraph of today’s tropical weather narrative from Hawaii.All the weather information you could possibly want, and perhaps more than that, is located up the page from here. I’m about ready to hit the road to Kahului, starting off my weekend just the way I love to…going to see a new film. This time around it’s called Bangkok Dangerous (2008), starring Nicholas Cage, among others, who I don’t recognize any of their names. A short synopsis of this film, which is getting only average (or less) ratings, is about a cold-blooded hit man who heads to Bangkok to pull off four jobs, and winds up falling in love with a local girl, and bonding with his errand boy. Now I’m sure that many of you are scratching your head, wondering what in the world I could possibly want to see this film for? My response is, that’s a good question! Well, lets see, what do I have to say for myself? I suppose it’s just that I feel like seeing what Bangkok is like, and if I tell the complete truth, it just happens to be something to do. I love my films, and find great entertainment in sitting there in the dark with strangers all around, eating popcorn for dinner. Oh yeah, here’s a trailerfor this film, if you are interested in taking a look. At any rate, then tomorrow, I’m planning on an early trip over to the Lahaina side for a surf session. I have an appointment in Paia with a person who is going to get my sore shoulders healed. Some of you may remember that I fell skateboarding over a year ago, and my shoulders have been out of sorts ever since. I hope you have a great Friday night wherever you happen to be spending it! Aloha for now…Glenn.
Interesting:
Asian pollution from Asian power plants, cooking and heating could create summer hot spots in the central United States and southern Europe by mid-century, U.S. climate scientists reported on Thursday. Unlike the long-lived greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, the particle and gas pollution cited in this report only stays in the air for a few days or weeks but its warming effect on the climate half a world away could last for decades, the scientists said. "We found that these short-lived pollutants have a greater influence on the Earth’s climate throughout the 21st century than previously thought," said Hiram "Chip" Levy of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "By 2050, two of the three climate models we use found that changes in short-lived pollutants will contribute 20 percent of the predicted global warming." By 2100, that figure goes up to 25 percent, Levy said in a telephone briefing. The short-lived pollution that can cause long-term warming comes from soot, also known as the black carbon particles that result from fires, and sulfate particles, which are emitted by power plants. Soot particles are dark and absorb heat; sulfates are light and reflect heat, actually cooling things down.
Asian soot and sulfate pollution is likely to make for hotter, drier summers in the American Midwest and the Mediterranean region of southern Europe, Levy said, adding that heating and drying effects are not expected to hit Asia. The reason for the expected pollution-related warming trend is that sulfate pollution, which has been linked to respiratory problems, is expected to decrease dramatically while soot pollution is forecast to continue increasing in Asia. Ground-level ozone emitted by U.S. transport vehicles is also a factor, the scientists said. These pollutants have usually been dealt with as threats to air quality, but should also be considered for their impact on climate change, said Drew Shindell, a climate expert at NASA. Carbon dioxide, which spurs global warming and is emitted from natural and human-made sources, still is going to dominate the climate change picture in the coming century, but because modern societies are built to emit lots of this substance, change is likely to be slow, Shindell said. Targeting these air pollutants now makes sense, because of their role in the quality of the air people breathe as well as their impact on global warming, he said.
Interesting2:
Satellite imagery released earlier this week provided further evidence that deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon region accelerated dramatically this year. Between August 2007 and July 2008, 8,147 square kilometers of the Brazilian Amazon were cleared, according to the country’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE). This is an area more than twice the size of the U.S. state of Rhode Island. The expanse of deforested land is about 69 percent greater than last year, when 4,820 square kilometers were removed. "We’re not content," Brazilian Environment Minister Carlos Minc told The Associated Press. "Deforestation has to fall more and the conditions for sustainable development have to improve." Last year’s deforestation numbers, however, were the lowest since recording began in the 1970s. The amount of forest cleared this year, while still substantial, is also less than previous years.
As world leaders debate a new international agreement on climate change, preservation of the vast Amazon forest, which stores large amounts of carbon, has been identified as a necessary step to avoid accelerated warming. The Brazilian government has taken additional steps in recent months to curb illegal logging, but a growing global market for beef and soybeans encourages the deforestation. The diverse Amazon forest contains one in ten of the world’s known species and enough vegetation to absorb an estimated 10 percent of atmospheric carbon dioxide, not including oceanic carbon sinks. Since the 1970s, about 20 percent of the Amazon forest has been cut, leaving mainly open fields with little diversity in its place. Illegal deforestation reached its peak this year between August 2007 and April, when satellite images observed about 84 percent of the year’s deforestation.
Interesting3:
The Rosetta deep space probe successfully passed close to an asteroid 250 million miles from Earth, the European Space Agency said Friday night. In a mission that may bring man closer to solving the mystery of the solar system’s birth, the craft completed its flyby of the Steins asteroid, also known as Asteroid 2867 — now in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter — at around 3:15 p.m. EDT. As planned, the spacecraft’s signal was lost for about 90 minutes as engineers turned it away from the sun and because the craft was moving too fast for its antennas to transmit. The resumption of the craft’s signal transmission was greeted with cheers from ESA engineers and technicians. "We’re extremely happy that it worked," mission manager Gerhard Schwehm said, sipping a glass of champagne after the announcement from the control room. "It’s a big relief. People can relax a bit now and everything seems fine." Schwehm said the agency would work to get images and other data collected by the probe processed as soon as possible.
He said the first images should be released to the public Saturday. "The operation went very well," Paolo Ferri, the head of the solar and planetary missions division and Rosetta flight operations director, said in a short speech after the announcement. "The spacecraft is in exactly the condition we expected, which is good. All indications are that everything was super successful." The timing of the flyby meant the asteroid was illuminated by the sun, making it likely the transmitted images will be clear and sharp for scientists working on the origins of the solar system. "Dead rocks can say a lot," Schwehm said. Astronomers have had to work with limited data from previous passes of asteroids, such as when ESA’s Giotto probe swept by Halley’s Comet in 1986, photographing long canyons, broad craters and 3,000-foot hills. Steins was Rosetta’s first scientific target as flies in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter en route to its main destination, the comet 67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which is scheduled for 2014. The probe was launched in March 2004.
Interesting4:
There’s a mushroom boom in the wet woods of the Northeast this summer. Hillsides bloom with black trumpets. Disc-shaped mushrooms called artist’s conch sprout from tree trunks. Forests are laced with tasty chanterelles giving off faint whiffs of apricot and with a pretty but deadly variety called destroying angels. "For the last two summers we’ve had lousy crops of mushrooms because it was too hot and it was too dry," agroforester Bob Beyfuss said during a recent ramble through a Catskill forest. Not so during this season of soaking rains. Beyfuss found caps sprouting from the forest floor practically behind every tree. Rainfall has been well above average around New York and New England this summer, with some areas hit with twice as much precipitation from July 1 through Aug. 18, according to the Northeast Regional Climate Center at CornellUniversity.
Rain is fungus fuel, and it has helped along a bumper crop for mushrooms that is expected to last into the fall foraging season. "It’s been the best summer since 1989," said Russ Cohen, a veteran forager from the Boston area who hunts around the Northeast. Cohen said porcini mushrooms have been particularly easy to find this year. He added that chanterelles, a horn-shaped mushroom popular with foragers, have been notably larger. In New York‘s northern Catskills, Beyfuss, who works at the Cornell Cooperative Extension Agroforestry Resource Center, left the woods on a recent tour with a baseball cap full of black trumpets and a plump chanterelle.
Comments Off on Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs / September 4-5, 2008
September 4-5 2008
Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Thursday afternoon:
Lihue, Kauai – 85 Honolulu, Oahu – 89 Kaneohe, Oahu – 85 Kahului, Maui – 88 Hilo, Hawaii – 85
Kailua-kona – 83 Air Temperaturesranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level, and on the taller mountains…at 4 p.m. Thursday afternoon:
Honolulu, Oahu– 87F Kailua-kona, Hawaii– 81
Haleakala Crater- 63 (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 Thursday afternoon:
0.22 Mount Waialeale, Kauai
0.35 Poamoho 2, Oahu
0.05 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.00 Kahoolawe 0.56 Kula Branch Station, Maui
0.26 Keahole airport, Big Island Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather mapshowing a 1030 millibar high pressure system located far to the northeast of Hawaii. At the same time we find several low pressure systems, with their associated cold front, pushing the high pressure cell’s ridge down closer to our islands. This pressure configuration will prompt our local trade winds to be lighter through Saturday. Satellite and Radar Images: To view the cloud conditions we have here in Hawaii, please use the following satellite links, starting off with theInfrared 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 animatedradar image.
Hawaii’s Mountains – Here’s a link to the live webcam on the summit of near 14,000 footMauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. The tallest peak on the island of Maui is theHaleakala 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
Large south swell breaking on our leeward beaches Photo Credit: flickr.com
The trade winds will continue blowing, although getting lighter today through Saturday…picking up Sunday into early next week.As this weather map shows, we have a 1031 millibar high pressure system far northeast of our islands Thursday night…well offshore from the northern California/southern Oregon coast. There are several low pressure systems to the north-northwest, with their associated cold fronts in the middle latitudes of the north central Pacific. These areas of low pressure will push this high pressure system’s ridge down closer to our islands over the next couple of days. This in turn has softened our local winds, giving a somewhat muggy feeling to our atmosphere near the beaches. By the way, the cold fronts won’t be able to push down into our tropical latitudes…remaining far to the northwest of our Hawaiian Islands. The computer models suggest that later this weekend, into early next week, our trade winds will boost back into the moderately strong levels again.
There will be a few generally light showers on the windward sides, with some afternoon clouds and showers leeward as well. The lighter trade winds through Saturday will prompt some increase in afternoon upcountry showers falling locally. The bias for showers will return to the windward sides later this weekend into next week, as the trade winds become better established then. The overlying atmosphere is quite dry and stable at the moment, so that we shouldn’t see heavy showers falling anywhere. There are still no organized rain makers in our vicinity, so that fair weather will prevail. As usual, and depending upon the amount of upstream cloudiness, there will be fairly minor variations in showers arriving along our windward coasts and slopes…generally though most generous during the night and early morning hours. In terms of tropical cyclones, all the action remains over in the Caribbean Sea, and the Atlantic Ocean.At last count we have three tropical storms: Josephine, Ike, and Hanna in the Atlantic and Caribbean…with a fourth trying to breaking into this already well established group. Here’s a graphical map, showing these storms that continue to march westward. The next in line to impact the United States, will be tropical storm Hanna, which will bring inclement weather conditions all along the eastern seaboard…here’s a tracking map. Then Ike, which has become a hurricane, will slam through the Caribbean Islands, potentially on its way towards an impact in the United States. Here’s what the hurricane models are showing for Ike, which looks like it will become a potentially very dangerous storm…putting eastern Florida potentially under the gun. Josephine is still too far away to know what she will eventually do.
It’s early Thursday evening here in Kihei, Maui, as I begin writing this last paragraph of today’s tropical weather narrative from Hawaii. These days its quite easy to get away with calling our local weather conditions normal. This hasn’t always been the case this year, although there hasn’t been anything all that unusual for the last month or more. We’ll continue to see just the fairly classic late summer trade wind weather pattern. The one thing though, that would qualify as headline weather news, is occurring in the marine sector, where high surf conditions prevail. This larger than normal south swell was generated late last week to the east of New Zealand, where a very dynamic storm generated swells in our direction. Not every leeward, south and west facing beach, will find these pounders breaking, but enough will, so that folks should pay close attention to not getting hurt out there in these waves! Other than that, I expect nice to very nice conditions to prevail, with perhaps more sunshine in general during the morning hours, than during the afternoons. I’ll be back very early Friday morning, well before sunrise as a matter of fact, preparing your next tropical weather narrative from paradise. I hope you have a great Thursday night until then! Aloha for now…Glenn.
Interesting: Nissan Motor Company on Thursday became the first domestic automaker to launch a diesel car in Japan in six years, blazing the trail for rivals looking to revive the fuel-saving engine to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The X-Trail 20GT sport utility vehicle, powered by an engine lead-developed by partner Renault SA, is also the world’s first "clean" diesel car to meet Japan’s new emissions standards to kick in from October 2009, said to be the strictest in the world. Diesel cars make up more than half of the European market, but a powerful smear campaign by Tokyo’s popular governor in the late 1990s deriding them as smelly, noisy and polluting has all but erased the fuel-efficient cars from Japanese roads. Nissan was the standout among major automakers in U.S. auto sales data released on Wednesday, surprising investors with a 13.6 percent increase in August sales. The diesel X-Trail, only available in manual transmission, costs just under 3 million yen ($27,710), carrying a price premium of about 400,000 yen ($3,695) over a comparable gasoline version. Nissan said it hoped to sell about 100 units a month.
"For a long time, we had no diesel cars in Japan," Nissan Chief Operating Officer Toshiyuki Shiga told a news conference. "I’m not sure how much it would spread in the market now, but if it does well we will consider broadening the line-up." The only other diesel car available in Japan now is Daimler AG’s Mercedes-Benz E320 CDI sedan, launched in late 2006. While the company says reception has exceeded its expectations, a sticker price of over 8 million yen ($73,510) has kept sales volumes here at a paltry 100 units a month. Volkswagen AG, Japan‘s top-selling foreign brand, is also preparing to offer a diesel car in Japan next year. Other domestic automakers, including Honda Motor Co, Mitsubishi Motors Corp and Subaru-maker Fuji Heavy Industries Ltd, will be joining Nissan in the segment over the next few years. But conspicuously absent from that list is market leader Toyota Motor Corp, without which proliferation may be difficult.
Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Wednesday afternoon:
Lihue, Kauai – 85 Honolulu, Oahu – 89 Kaneohe, Oahu – 84 Kahului, Maui – 86 Hilo, Hawaii – 86
Kailua-kona – 83 Air Temperaturesranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level, and on the taller mountains…at 4 p.m. Wednesday afternoon:
Port Allen, Kauai– 88F Kahului, Maui– 81
Haleakala Crater- 55 (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 Wednesday afternoon: 0.76 Mount Waialeale, Kauai
0.13 Oahu Forest NWR, Oahu
0.00 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.00 Kahoolawe 0.11 Oheo Gulch, Maui
0.08 Hilo airport, Big Island Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather mapshowing a 1032 millibar high pressure system located far to the northeast of Hawaii. At the same time we find a low pressure system, with its associated cold front, pushing the high pressure cell’s ridge down closer to our islands. This pressure configuration will prompt our local trade winds to be lighter for the time being. Satellite and Radar Images: To view the cloud conditions we have here in Hawaii, please use the following satellite links, starting off with theInfrared 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 animatedradar image.
Hawaii’s Mountains – Here’s a link to the live webcam on the summit of near 14,000 footMauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. The tallest peak on the island of Maui is theHaleakala 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.
The trade winds will prevail, getting softer over the next few days…only to rebound again during the weekend.As thisweather mapshows, we have a 1031 millibar high pressure system far northeast of our islands Wednesday evening…the source of our local winds. In general, lighter trade winds will prevail, with those typically windier places having somewhat higher gusts. As the trades get lighter into Friday, our atmosphere may begin to feel a bit sultry along the beaches…with the cooling and refreshing relief from the muggy weather on tap for the weekend and beyond.
There will be occasional showery periods along the windward sides, although nothing out of the ordinary. Satellite imagery shows clouds moving by to the north, in the trade wind flow…which may bring a spattering of showers overnight perhaps to Kauai. The lighter trade winds through Friday will prompt some increase in afternoon upcountry showers falling locally. The showers will re-focus their efforts along the windward sides again this weekend…as the trade winds pick up in strength.
In terms of tropical cyclones, all the action remains over in the Caribbean Sea, and the Atlantic Ocean.At last count we have three tropical storms: Josephine, Ike, and Hanna, along with now retired Gustav, which is still bringing heavy rains to the south. Here’s a graphical map, showing this impressive array of storms that continue to march westward. The next in line to impact the United States, will be hurricane Hanna, taking aim on the south Carolina coast or thereabouts…here’s a tracking map. Then Ike, which will become a hurricane very soon, will wander into the Caribbean Islands, although it’s still too early to know exactly where it will end up, or whether it will impact the United States. Here’s what the hurricane models are showing for Ike, which looks like it will become a potentially very dangerous storm.
It’s early Wednesday evening here in Kihei, Maui, as I begin writing this last paragraph of today’s tropical weather narrative from Hawaii. The area of showers being carried along in the trade wind flow, that we thought might bring an increase in showers tonight…now will slide by to the north. The southern edge of these showers may clip the northern half of Kauai, but not much further south than that. As the trade winds slow down now, there will be an increase in the amount of shower activity we see in the upcountry leeward sides, especially over Maui and the Big Island…like we saw on Maui Wednesday afternoon. Other than that, the big news will occur along our leeward beaches, where rising high surf will begin pounding those south and west facing shores. Folks visiting these shorelines over the next 3-4 days should exercise caution when going in the ocean, as the breakers will be large and potentially dangerous to inexperienced people. A high surf advisory has been issued by the NWS forecast office in Honolulu, beginning on Thursday. I’ll be back very early Thursday morning with your next new weather narrative, I hope you have a great Wednesday night until then. Aloha for now…Glenn.
Interesting:
A huge 19 square mile (55 square km) ice shelf in Canada’s northern Arctic broke away last month and the remaining shelves have shrunk at a "massive and disturbing" rate, the latest sign of accelerating climate change in the remote region, scientists said on Tuesday. They said the Markham Ice Shelf, one of just five remaining ice shelves in the Canadian Arctic, split away from Ellesmere Island in early August. They also said two large chunks totaling 47 square miles had broken off the nearby Serson Ice Shelf, reducing it in size by 60 percent. "The changes … were massive and disturbing," said Warwick Vincent, director of the Centre for Northern Studies at Laval University in Quebec. Temperatures in large parts of the Arctic have risen far faster than the global average in recent decades, a development that experts say is linked to global warming. "These substantial calving events underscore the rapidity of changes taking place in the Arctic," said Derek Mueller, an Arctic ice shelf specialist at TrentUniversity in Ontario.
"These changes are irreversible under the present climate and indicate that the environmental conditions that have kept these ice shelves in balance for thousands of years are no longer present," he said in an e-mailed statement from the research team sent late on Tuesday. Mueller said the total amount of ice lost from the shelves along Ellesmere Island this summer totaled 83 square miles — more than three times the area of Manhattan island. The figure is more than 10 times the amount of ice shelf cover that scientists estimated on July 30 would vanish from around the island this summer. "Reduced sea ice conditions and unusually high air temperatures have facilitated the ice shelf losses," said Luke Copland of the University of Ottawa.
Interesting2:
Energy can be saved in surprising places, but let’s meander a bit first. If you own a new car, built in the last decade or so, take look around the wheel wells or perhaps the door sills. You might see pieces of clear plastic film adhered to the bodywork. If you have them they’re put there by the manufacturer to protect the paint in that area from scuff marks or stone chips. The plastic film is a lot tougher than paint is. That plastic film might make you wonder. If a stone resistant film can be applied to a few small areas why not the same film to protect a whole car? And why only in clear plastic? Why not in colors? According Soliant, of Lancaster, South Carolina, the film could be applied to whole cars and in an infinite number of color options, including two-tones, metallics, pearlescents, special effects and finishes including chrome and brushed chrome. Soliant says it can match any color car makers throw at them.
Cars wouldn’t have to be painted, just a snazzy film applied, including graphics. Why don’t the big car companies do this? Stubbornness. Slow to change. Huge investments in assembly-line paint shops that they don’t want to scrap. But that’s just big car companies. Little ones, especially startups, might be more open minded and willing to “paintfilm” a car rather than paint it conventionally. (Paintfilm is the name Soliant gives its product.) As it turns out, one startup, Carbon Motors Corporation, which is developing and will manufacture the world’s first purpose-built law enforcement patrol vehicle, the E7 will give paintfilm a go. In building its production facility for the diesel engined, plastic and aluminum patrol car the company will skip building a paint shop, saving as much as 40 percent of the cost of the new production plant. And the savings won’t end there. Year after year there will be continued energy savings.
Interesting3:
Thesurvival chances of the albatross, now officially the most threatened seabird family in the world, have been improved following a new report released by WWF-South Africa. At least 28 species of albatross and petrel have been caught by South African fisheries, of which 13 are threatened with extinction. The birds are caught trying to retrieve bait from longline fishing hooks, or are injured or killed during trawling operations. A deterioration of their breeding habitats and targeted hunting operations are other factors. Samantha Petersen, manager of the WWF-South Africa Responsible Fisheries Programme, said that the report – “Understanding and Mitigating Vulnerable Bycatch in Southern African Trawl and Longline Fisheries” – improved substantially the understanding of the circumstances under which seabirds were killed.
“The findings help accurately identify management measures to reduce the wasteful killing of these magnificent birds while not unnecessarily disrupting fishing activities or impacting other vulnerable marine life like turtles and sharks,” said Dr Petersen. The report, which follows WWF’s release of the results of four years of groundbreaking longline marine turtle bycatch data in Latin America, reinforces the need for fishermen to implement the mandatory and readily available measures that help prevent birds from becoming entangled in fishing gear. “While this information is valuable, it’s crucial that it translates into compliance with mitigation measures on the part of fishing operations,” added Dr Petersen. The report says that bird-scaring lines have proved to be simple yet effective way of preventing seabirds from being snagged during longline fishing, and similar measures have helped limit the impact of other fishing techniques.
Interesting4:
The next U.S. president must show greater leadership than previous administrations in tackling climate change, according to the head of the United Nations. "All the countries in the international community are looking for more and greater leadership from the United States," U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said after a celebration to mark the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Ban praised the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush for playing an "important role" in discussing how countries can minimize greenhouse gas emissions, thought to be the main reason for global warming.
But the United States has not done enough to turn talk into action, considering it is one of the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, he said. Emerging powers such as China and India point to the U.S. rejection of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, when arguing against making commitments on climate change. Ban told journalists in Geneva that all developed countries need to take part if emissions are to be cut by at least half by 2050. In a report published last year, the IPCC said such a reduction would be necessary to stop global temperatures rising more than 3.6 degrees above preindustrial levels. Failure to do so will lead to severe droughts and cause massive hunger and poverty, it said. "I think that, whoever may be elected as the president of the United States, may be in a better position to lead this process," Ban said.
Interesting5:
Reports of unusually fiery orange sunsets on Earth and ruby red rings around the planet Venus have popped up on the Internet in the last week. Some skywatchers suspect that these views are being colored by the dust and gases injected into the atmosphere by the Aug. 7 eruption of Alaska‘s Kasatochi volcano. The skywatchers are probably right. Kasatochi, part of the Aleutian Island chain, sent an ash plume more than 35,000 feet (10,600 meters) into the atmosphere when it erupted last month. "This is a big ash-producing eruption," said Peter Cervelli, a research geophysicist with the United States Geological Survey at the Alaska Volcano Observatory. During a survey of the area after the eruption, Cervelli and his colleagues found ashfall deposits more than 6 inches (15 centimeters) deep at a spot 15.5 miles (25 kilometers) away from the volcano.
The fine ash injected by a volcanic eruption into the stratosphere can be carried by winds all over the world. Sulfur dioxide spewed from volcanoes can react in the atmosphere to form sulfate aerosols (aerosols are tiny particles suspended in the air). Both ash and aerosols can scatter the sun’s rays, giving a sunset its apparent color. Particles in the air normally scatter incoming sunlight — this is why the sky is blue. Sunsets (and sunrises) appear reddish because the sun’s rays have more of the atmosphere to travel through, and only the longer waves at the red end of the spectrum can make it. Sulfate aerosols in particular can intensify this effect by adding more obstacles for the light to get through.
Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Tuesday afternoon:
Lihue, Kauai – 85 Honolulu, Oahu – 88 Kaneohe, Oahu – 82 Kahului, Maui – 88 Hilo, Hawaii – 85
Kailua-kona – 86 Air Temperaturesranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level, and on the taller mountains…at 4 p.m. Tuesday afternoon:
Port Allen, Kauai– 88F Princeville, Kauai– 81
Haleakala Crater- 57 (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:
0.46 Mount Waialeale, Kauai 0.80 Oahu Forest NWR, Oahu
0.00 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.00 Kahoolawe 0.19 West Wailuaiki, Maui
0.47 Kealakekua, Big Island Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather mapshowing a 1031 millibar high pressure system located far to the northeast of Hawaii. This pressure configuration will keep our trade winds blowing generally in the light to moderately strong range…although stronger and gusty in those windiest locations. Satellite and Radar Images: To view the cloud conditions we have here in Hawaii, please use the following satellite links, starting off with theInfrared 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 animatedradar image.
Hawaii’s Mountains – Here’s a link to the live webcam on the summit of near 14,000 footMauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. The tallest peak on the island of Maui is theHaleakala 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
Maui in the distance, from Kohala on the Big Island Photo Credit: flickr.com
The long lasting trade wind weather pattern will continue through this week.As thisweather mapshows, we have a 1030 millibar high pressure system far northeast of our islands Tuesday evening…the source of our local winds. In general, light to moderately strong trade winds will prevail, with those typically windier places having higher gusts. The winds have calmed down enough now, or are about to…that the short-lived small craft wind advisory around Maui and the Big Island was dropped Tuesday afternoon.
The trade winds will carry a few showers to the windward sides at times. The upcountry leeward sides could see an afternoon shower as well. The upper level trough of low pressure, which provided some enhancement to our local showers over the last several days, has moved far enough away now…that there will be no more influence here in Hawaii. This leaves us in a fairly normal precipitation regime, with nothing out of the ordinary expected for the time being…with only a minor increase in showers Wednesday into the night, then drier again Thursday.
A tropical disturbance well south-southwest of the Hawaiian Islands remains non-threatening.This area, which is approximately 700 miles south-southwest of Honolulu, is moving in a westerly direction. The upper level winds aren’t favorable for strengthening…with little if any chance of it becoming a tropical depression. Here’s a satellite image of the area, look for the small thunderstorm complex directly south of our islands…showing quite a bit of upper wind shear on the thunderstorms associated with this area of disturbed weather. Here’s what the hurricane models are showing for what’s being called Investigation Area 95C.
In terms of tropical cyclones, all the action remains over in the Caribbean Sea, and the Atlantic Ocean.At last count we have three tropical storms: Josephine, Ike, and Hanna, along with soon to be retired Gustav, which is dissipating quickly, although still brining gusty winds and very heavy rains. Here’s a graphical track map, showing this impressive parade of storms that continue to march westward. The next in line to impact the United States, will be hurricane Hanna, taking aim on the south Carolina coast or thereabouts. I’ll continue to carry some news about these storms, but will back off a little from the detail that I brought to this page with former hurricane Gustav.
It’s early Tuesday evening here in Kihei, Maui, as I begin writing this last paragraph of today’s tropical weather narrative from Hawaii.Glancing out the window here in Kihei, I see a predominance of clear blue skies, with a spattering of white cumulus clouds around the edges. The trade winds continue to blow nicely, helping to temper the otherwise hot late summer afternoon temperatures. The strongest gust that I note at around 5pm this afternoon, was the rather impressive 39 mph, at that windy Maalaea Bay. Looking into the future, I still don’t see anything of any threat on the weather horizon. This leaves us with just the usual windward biased showers, which may become a bit more numerous during the next 24-36 hours. All things considered, our weather remains on the tame side, with just the right amount of wind and rain to keep the word "Paradise", properly fixed to our Aloha state! I’ll be back very early Wednesday morning with your next new tropical weather narrative, I hope you have a great Tuesday night until then! Aloha for now…Glenn.
The sun has reached a milestone not seen for nearly 100 years: an entire month has passed without a single visible sunspot being noted. The event is significant as many climatologists now believe solar magnetic activity – which determines the number of sunspots — is an influencing factor for climate on earth. According to data from Mount Wilson Observatory, UCLA, more than an entire month has passed without a spot. The last time such an event occurred was June of 1913. Sunspot data has been collected since 1749. When the sun is active, it’s not uncommon to see sunspot numbers of 100 or more in a single month. Every 11 years, activity slows, and numbers briefly drop to near-zero. Normally sunspots return very quickly, as a new cycle begins. But this year — which corresponds to the start of Solar Cycle 24 — has been extraordinarily long and quiet, with the first seven months averaging a sunspot number of only 3.
August followed with none at all. The astonishing rapid drop of the past year has defied predictions, and caught nearly all astronomers by surprise. In 2005, a pair of astronomers from the National Solar Observatory (NSO) in Tucson attempted to publish a paper in the journal Science. The pair looked at minute spectroscopic and magnetic changes in the sun. By extrapolating forward, they reached the startling result that, within 10 years, sunspots would vanish entirely. At the time, the sun was very active. Most of their peers laughed at what they considered an unsubstantiated conclusion. The journal ultimately rejected the paper as being too controversial. The paper’s lead author, William Livingston, tells DailyTech that, while the refusal may have been justified at the time, recent data fits his theory well. He says he will be "secretly pleased" if his predictions come to pass.
Interesting2:
As Anne Giblin was lugging four-foot tubes of Arctic lakebed mud from her inflatable raft to her nearby lab this summer, she said, “Mud is a great storyteller.”Dr. Giblin, a senior scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., is part of the Long Term Ecological Research network at an Arctic science outpost here operated by the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. Public discussion of complicated climate change is largely reduced to carbon: carbon emissions, carbon footprints, carbon trading. But other chemicals have large roles in the planet’s health, and the one Dr. Giblin is looking for in Arctic mud, one that a growing number of other researchers are also concentrating on, is nitrogen. In addition to having a role in climate change, nitrogen has a huge, probably more important biological impact through its presence in fertilizer. Peter Vitousek, a Stanford ecologist whose 1994 essay put nitrogen on the environmental map, co-authored a study this summer in the journal Nature that put greater attention on the nitrogen cycle and warned against ignoring it in favor of carbon benefits.
For example, Dr. Vitousek said in an interview, “There’s a great danger in doing something like, oh, overfertilizing a cornfield to boost biofuel consumption, where the carbon benefits are far outweighed by the nitrogen damage.” Soon after Dr. Vitousek’s report, the journal Geophysical Research Letters branded as a “missing greenhouse gas” nitrogen trifluoride, which is used in production of semiconductors and in liquid-crystal displays found in many electronics. Nitrogen trifluoride, which is not one of the six gases covered by the Kyoto Protocol, the celebrated international global warming accord, is about 17,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Its estimated worldwide release into the atmosphere this year is equivalent to the total global-warming emissions from Austria. “The nitrogen dilemma,” Dr. Vitousek added, “is not just thinking that carbon is all that matters. But also thinking that global warming is the only environmental issue. The weakening of biodiversity, the pollution of rivers, these are local issues that need local attention. Smog. Acid rain. Coasts. Forests. It’s all nitrogen.”
Interesting3:
Researchers confirm that surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere were warmer over the last 10 years than any time during the last 1300 years, and, if the climate scientists include the somewhat controversial data derived from tree-ring records, the warming is anomalous for at least 1700 years. "Some have argued that tree-ring data is unacceptable for this type of study," says Michael Mann, associate professor of meteorology and geosciences and director of PennState‘s Earth System Science Center. "Now we can eliminate tree rings and still have enough data from other so-called ‘proxies’ to derive a long-term Northern Hemisphere temperature record." The proxies used by the researchers included information from marine and lake sediment cores, ice cores, coral cores and tree rings. "We looked at a much expanded database and our methods are more sophisticated than those used previously," says Mann.
In today’s (Sept. 2) online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers note, "Conclusions are less definitive for the Southern Hemisphere and globe, which we attribute to larger uncertainties arising from the sparser available proxy data in the Southern Hemisphere." The research team included Mann; Ray Bradley, university distinguished professor, geosciences and director, Climate System Research Center, University of Massachusetts; Malcolm Hughes, regents’ professor, and Fenbiao Ni, research associate, the Laboratory of Tree Ring Research, University of Arizona; Zhihua Zhang and Sonya Miller, research associates, meteorology, Penn State; and Scott Rutherford, assistant professor, environmental sciences, Roger Williams University. The National Research Council suggested revisiting surface temperatures in their "Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years," to include newer data and techniques and confirmed results of a 1990s paper by Mann and colleagues. Results of this study without tree-ring data show that for the Northern Hemisphere, the last 10 years are likely unusually warm for not just the past 1,000 as reported in the 1990s paper and others, but for at least another 300 years going back to about A.D. 700 without using tree-ring data. The same conclusion holds back to A.D. 300 if the researchers include tree-ring data.
Interesting4:
Could our coastlines disappear underwater much sooner than we think? The controversial view that sea levels could rise at a rate of more than 1 metre per century has found support from a new study of a long-melted ice sheet.In reconstructing the events at the end of the last ice age, Anders Carlson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and colleagues found that the Laurentide ice sheet, which covered most of North America between 95,000 and 7000 years ago, rapidly disintegrated. The researchers began by studying beryllium isotopes in rocks to determine how the outer edges of the two final chunks of the Laurentide ice sheet retreated. They found that the ice retreated rapidly between 9000 and 8500 years ago, stabilised, and then made its final rapid retreat between 7600 and 6800 years ago. The team calculated the volume of water that would have been released in each of these melting stages, and the rate at which it must have raised sea levels. They concluded that levels would have climbed 1.3 metres per century in the earlier period, and 0.7 metres per century in the final melt.
Carlson then used a sophisticated computer model — one that is used to forecast future climate change — to check the results. The model predicted an average sea level rise of 1.3 metres per century. "The forces that led to the demise of the Laurentide ice sheet in a very rapid way are comparable to the forces the same computer models predict we will experience this century if we do not rapidly curb greenhouse gas emissions," says Gavin Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who collaborated with Carlson on the study. For Mark Siddall of the University of Bristol, UK, and Michael Kaplan of the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, however, there remain many differences between what happened nearly 10,000 years ago and the climate change Earth is currently experiencing. "To what extent this dynamic response of the Laurentide ice sheet to past temperature change can be considered analogous to present and future reduction of the Greenland ice sheet remains unresolved," they say in an associated commentary. "But their work suggests that future reductions of the Greenland ice sheet on the order of one metre per century are not out of the question."
Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Monday afternoon:
Lihue, Kauai – 85 Honolulu, Oahu – 88 Kaneohe, Oahu – 83 Kahului, Maui – 87 Hilo, Hawaii – 83
Kailua-kona – 85 Air Temperaturesranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level, and on the taller mountains…at 6 p.m. Monday evening:
Port Allen, Kauai– 84F Molokai airport – 78
Haleakala Crater- 46 (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 Monday afternoon:
0.82 Wainiha, Kauai
0.44 South Fork Kaukonahua, Oahu
0.01 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.05 Kahoolawe 0.36 Puu kukui, Maui 0.97 Pahoa, Big Island Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather mapshowing a 1029 millibar high pressure system located far to the northeast of Hawaii. This pressure configuration will keep our trade winds blowing generally in the light to moderately strong range…although stronger and gusty in those windiest locations. Satellite and Radar Images: To view the cloud conditions we have here in Hawaii, please use the following satellite links, starting off with theInfrared 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 animatedradar image.
Hawaii’s Mountains – Here’s a link to the live webcam on the summit of near 14,000 footMauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. The tallest peak on the island of Maui is theHaleakala 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
Molokai in the distance…from pineapple fields on Maui Photo Credit: flickr.com
Light to moderately strong trade winds will remain well established over the Hawaiian Islands through the next week. As this weather map shows, we have a large 1029 millibar high pressure system far northeast of our islands now…the source of our local winds. In general, light to moderately strong trade winds will prevail…with those typically windier places having higher gusts. The winds have gotten strong enough in places around Maui and the Big Island, that small craft wind advisories have been hoisted Monday.
There will be showers at times along the windward sides through Tuesday…then drier weather will prevail by mid-week.There will be some enhancement to our windward biased showers at times, with an occasional heavy shower falling. This will be the result of cooler air aloft, associated with an upper trough of low pressure to the west of Kauai. The upcountry leeward sides could see an afternoon shower as well. Shower activity will begin to ease up some starting Wednesday. Hurricane Gustav came ashore over the Louisiana coast early Monday morning as a category 2 storm. As this track map from the National Hurricane Center in Miami shows…the gradually weakening hurricane has already degraded into a weaker tropical storm. The winds will diminish as it continues its journey over land, although rainfall will remain heavy. Gustave will weaken further Tuesday into a tropical depression. Here’s the latestsatellite image of the storm. Here is looping radar image of Gustav as it moves inland.
Meanwhile, hurricane Hanna, in the Caribbean Sea, will strengthen as it continues on towards the southeast coast of the United States. As this NHC tracking map shows, Hanna is expected to be a hurricane when it makes landfall somewhere along the South Carolina coast. Here’s what the hurricane models are showing to be the various tracks over the next several days. Here’s a satellite image of Hanna, which will take over soon as the focus in the world of hurricanes…as Gustav winds down overland and becomes a remnant low pressure system over Texas or Oklahoma by mid-week. Meanwhile, we see yet another tropical system called tropical depression 9, in the Atlantic. This tropical cyclone has recently become tropical storm Ike, and eventually hurricane Ike as it heads towards the Bahamas. Here’s a NHC tracking map of Ike.
Speaking of tropical systems, there’s an area of low pressure, what we could consider a tropical disturbance, to the south of Hawaii now. This area, which is approximately 700 miles south of Honolulu, is moving in a west-northwest direction. The upper level winds aren’t favorable for strengthening…with little if any chance of it becoming a tropical depression. Here’s a satellite image of the area, look for the small thunderstorm complex directly south of our islands. Here’s what the hurricane models are showing for what’s being called Investigation Area 95C.
It’s early Monday evening here in Kula, Maui, as I begin writing this last paragraph of today’s tropical weather narrative from Hawaii. What a great day Monday was, and it was particularly appreciated I think due to the fact it was the Labor Day holiday! I thoroughly enjoyed myself, visiting with friends, with the high point of the day spent up at the lavender farm in Waipoli…here in Kula. I loved the views from there, and it was very interesting seeing all the various varieties of lavender. Apparently there are some 200 different kinds of this wonderfully scented plant. The rest of the day I spent at home, working with my neighbors around the property. I had to drag myself indoors at sunset, as it was still so nice out there. I’m looking forward to getting back into my regular work routine starting early Tuesday morning, when I’ll meet you here again then. I hope you have a great Monday night until then! Aloha for now…Glenn.
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