Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs / October 1-2, 2008

October 1-2 2008

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

Lihue, Kauai – 84
Honolulu, Oahu – 88
Kaneohe, Oahu – 83
Kahului, Maui – 86
Hilo, Hawaii – 83
Kailua-kona – 87

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

Port Allen, Kauai – 88F  
Lihue, Kauai – 77

Haleakala Crater    – 55  (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 43  (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:

0.31 Mount Waialeale Kauai
0.18 Wilson Tunnel, Oahu
0.03 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.00 Kahoolawe
0.23 West Wailuaiki, Maui
1.81 Honaunau, Big Island

Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a 1021 millibar high pressure system to the north-northwest of the islands. The placement and strength of this high pressure cell will keep light to moderately strong trade winds coming our way…locally a bit stronger.

Satellite and Radar Images: To view the cloud conditions we have here in Hawaii, please use the following satellite links, starting off with the Infrared Satellite Image of the islands to see all the clouds around the state during the day and night. This next image is one that gives close images of the islands only during the daytime hours, and is referred to as a Close-up visible image. This next image shows a larger view of the Pacific…giving perspective to the wider ranging cloud patterns in the Pacific Ocean. To help you keep track of where any showers may be around the islands, here’s the latest animated radar image. 

Hawaii’s Mountains – Here’s a link to the live webcam on the summit of near 14,000 foot Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. The tallest peak on the island of Maui is the Haleakala Crater, which is near 10,000 feet in elevation. These two webcams are available during the daylight hours here in the islands…and when there’s a big moon rising just after sunset for an hour or two! Plus, during the nights and early mornings you will be able to see stars, and the sunrise too…depending upon weather conditions.

Aloha Paragraphs

  Peaceful Hawaiian sunset
Photo Credit: flickr.com

The first cold front of the autumn season is now to the south of the Hawaiian Islands. The truth is that even if this frontal cloud band waited until October to arrive, it still would have been an early one…qualifying for the label unusual. The fact that it arrived during the month of September puts it into more rarified air! At any rate, the front is now in the area to our south, as shown on this satellite image. As can be seen, the linear integrity of the band is now falling apart, grading into just the scattered clouds that surround it generally to the north. The remnant clouds are down in the easterly trade wind belt of winds, which will pull and stretch what’s left of it into oblivion soon. Here in the islands, and to the north and northeast, our winds are still coming in from the northeast direction.

The airflow is dry and stable in the wake of the frontal passage. This in turn will put a good cap on the ability for our local cumulus and stratocumulus to grow vertically. These rather shallow clouds will be limited in their shower producing capabilities. These are all the qualities of a fairly routine trade wind weather pattern. The current NE breezes will gradually turn clockwise towards the east. Trade winds this time of year signify good weather, actually, some of the best of the autumn season…before we see more frequent cold fronts with their blustery Kona winds. That, or light and variable winds, with the associated haze and muggy weather that accompanies slack wind conditions.

It’s early Wednesday evening here in Kihei, Maui, as I begin writing this last section of today’s weather narrative from Hawaii. Looking out the next five days, I don’t see any new cold fronts coming our way from the northwest. High pressure systems remain parked more or less to the north of the state through the rest of this week. Looking east, over in the eastern Pacific, we find newly formed tropical storm Marie churning the waters there. Just eastward of Marie, as shown on that satellite picture, there may be a second storm brewing, which if it were to spin-up…would take the name Norbert. Marie isn’t expected to reach hurricane status, and by the end of the week, will still be located in the eastern Pacific, well east of the all important 140W line of longitude, separating the central and eastern Pacific Ocean. There’s always that chance that Marie, or whatever is left of her, might eventually bring an increase in showers to our windward sides.  ~~~ Wednesday was one of those near perfect days here in the islands…why wasn’t it perfect, well, I’m not exactly sure! I have no reason to believe that Thursday, and for that matter, all the rest of the days this week won’t remain firmly planted on the positive side of the weather spectrum. I’ll be back very early Thursday morning with your next new weather narrative from paradise, I hope you have a great Wednesday night! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting:

Wind turbines do not drive birds from surrounding areas, British researchers said on Wednesday, in findings which could make it easier to build more wind farms. Conservation groups have raised fears that large birds could get caught in the turbines and that the structures could disturb other species. But scientists found only one of the 23 species studied, the pheasant, was affected during their survey of two wind farms in eastern England. The findings published in the Journal of Applied Ecology could help government and business efforts to boost the number of wind farms as a way to increase production of renewable energy. "This is the first evidence suggesting that the present and future location of large numbers of wind turbines on European farmland is unlikely to have detrimental effects on farmland birds," Mark Whittingham, whose team from NewcastleUniversity carried out the research, said in a statement.

"This should be welcome news for nature conservationists, wind energy companies and policy makers." The survey studied the impact of two wind farms on about 3,000 birds in the area, including five species of conservation concern — the yellowhammer, the Eurasian tree sparrow, the corn bunting, the Eurasian skylark and the common reed bunting. The researchers recorded the density of birds at different distances from the turbines and found that aside from the pheasant, the structures posed no problems. The new findings are important because the European Union is committed to generating 20 percent of its energy from renewable resources by 2020 and is also seeking to boost biodiversity. The study did not look at the danger of the birds colliding with the turbines, which has been a worry of conservationists, Whittingham said.

Interesting2:

Will there be another "dust bowl" in the Great Plains similar to the one that swept the region in the 1930s?  It depends on water storage underground. Groundwater depth has a significant effect on whether the Great Plains will have a drought or bountiful year. Recent modeling results show that the depth of the water table, which results from lateral water flow at the surface and subsurface, determines the relative susceptibility of regions to changes in temperature and precipitation. "Groundwater is critical to understand the processes of recharge and drought in a changing climate," said Reed Maxwell, an atmospheric scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who along with a colleague at BonnUniversity analyzed the models that appear in the Sept. 28 edition of the journal Nature Geoscience.

Maxwell and Stefan Kollet studied the response of a watershed in the southern Great Plains in Oklahoma using a groundwater/surface-water/land-surface model. The southern Great Plains are an important agricultural region that has experienced severe droughts during the past century including the "dust bowl" of the 1930s. This area is characterized by little winter snowpack, rolling terrain and seasonal precipitation. While the onset of droughts in the region may depend on sea surface temperature, the length and depth of major droughts appear to depend on soil moisture conditions and land-atmosphere interactions.

Interesting3:

Thousands of feet below the bottom of the sea, off the shores of Santa Barbara, single-celled organisms are busy feasting on oil. Until now, nobody knew how many oily compounds were being devoured by the microscopic creatures, but new research led by David Valentine of UC Santa Barbara and Chris Reddy of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts has shed new light on just how extensive their diet can be. In a report to be published in the Oct. 1 edition of the journal Environmental Science & Technology, Valentine, Reddy, lead author George Wardlaw of UCSB, and three other co-authors detail how the microbes are dining on thousands of compounds that make up the oil seeping from the sea floor.

"It takes a special organism to live half a mile deep in the Earth and eat oil for a living," said Valentine, an associate professor of earth science at UCSB.  "There’s this incredibly complex diet for organisms down there eating the oil. It’s like a buffet." And, the researchers found, there may be one other byproduct being produced by all of this munching on oil – natural gas. "They’re eating the oil, and probably making natural gas out of it," Valentine said. "It’s actually a whole consortium of organisms – some that are eating the oil and producing intermediate products, and then those intermediate products are converted by another group to natural gas."

Interesting4:

Nearly 200 million people now live outside their country of birth. But the patterns of migration that got them there have proven difficult to project. Now scientists at RockefellerUniversity, with assistance from the United Nations, have developed a predictive model of worldwide population shifts that they say will provide better estimates of migration across international boundaries. Because countries use population projections to estimate local needs for jobs, schools, housing and health care, a more precise formula to describe how people move could lead to better use of resources and improved economic conditions. The model, recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, improves existing ways to estimate population movement between individual countries and is being considered by the United Nations as an approach all nations can utilize, says the study’s lead investigator, Joel E. Cohen, Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor and head of the Laboratory of Populations.

"From year to year, it has been difficult to calculate how the world’s population ebbs and flows between countries other than guessing that this year will resemble last year. But that is critical information in so many ways, and this model offers a new and unified approach that, we hope, will be of global benefit," Cohen says. Formulas used until now were so flawed that they sometimes estimated that net emigration away from a particular country was greater than the country’s original population, Cohen says, with a result that a nation was left with a predicted population of fewer than zero. "This has been a very inexact science," Cohen says.

Interesting5:

Some breakfast cereals marketed to U.S. children are more than half sugar by weight and many get only fair scores on nutritional value, Consumer Reports said on Wednesday. A serving of 11 popular cereals, including Kellogg’s Honey Smacks, carries as much sugar as a glazed doughnut, the consumer group found. And some brands have more sugar and sodium when formulated for the U.S. market than the same brands have when sold in other countries. Post Golden Crisp made by Kraft Foods Inc and Kellogg’s Honey Smacks are more than 50 percent sugar by weight, the group said, while nine brands are at least 40 percent sugar.

The most healthful brands are Cheerios with three grams of fiber per serving and one gram of sugar, Kix and Honey Nut Cheerios, all made by General Mills, and Life, made by Pepsico Inc’s Quaker Oats unit. "Be sure to read the product labels, and choose cereals that are high in fiber and low in sugar and sodium," Gayle Williams, deputy editor of Consumer Reports Health, said in a statement. Honey Smacks has 15 grams of sugar and just one gram of fiber per serving while Kellogg’s Corn Pops has 12 grams of sugar and no fiber. Consumer Reports studied how 91 children aged 6 to 16 poured their cereal and found they served themselves about 50 to 65 percent more on average than the suggested serving size for three of the four tested cereals.

Interesting6:

The federal government took a new, ecosystem-based approach to the endangered species list on Tuesday, proposing an all-at-once addition of 48 species, including plants, two birds and a fly, that live only on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. The action by the Interior Department would designate about 43 square miles as critical habitat for all the species rather than considering each species’ habitat separately, which has been the practice for three decades. Officials said considering the species all at once should save time and resources and would help the whole ecosystem.  The same approach is planned to help protect rare species on Oahu, the Big Island and Maui over the next several years, and it could be considered for the Arctic, big river systems of the Southwest and areas of the mountain West, according to department officials.

"For more than three decades, we’ve been struggling with one species at a time," said Dale Hall, Fish and Wildlife Service director, in a conference call with news media. "This gives us a chance to look at groups of species and at the same time be economical in the way we designate critical habitat." Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, in Honolulu for an island health conference, said the new "holistic approach" will benefit not only the listed species but also the rest of the ecosystem. "By addressing the common threats that occur across these ecosystems, we can more effectively focus our conservation efforts on restoring the functions of these shared habitats," Kempthorne said. The species include 45 plants, two birds and an insect, the Hawaiian picture-wing fly. The Endangered Species Coalition hailed the action as "an end to the drought," noting that the Interior Department has added only one species to the endangered list in the past two years, the polar bear.