January 29-30, 2009
Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Thursday afternoon:
Lihue, Kauai – 75
Honolulu, Oahu – 78
Kaneohe, Oahu – 73
Kahului, Maui – 79
Hilo, Hawaii – 79
Kailua-kona – 80
Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level, and on the highest mountains…at 4 p.m. Thursday afternoon:
Kahului, Maui – 78F
Lihue, Kauai – 72
Haleakala Crater – 45 (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 30 (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:
0.03 Wailua, Kauai
0.39 Wilson Tunnel, Oahu
1.23 Molokai
0.18 Lanai
0.02 Kahoolawe
0.84 Kahului airport, Maui
0.21 Puu Waawaa, Big Island
Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing high pressure systems far to the north and northeast of the Hawaiian Islands Friday. Our winds will remain out of the trade wind direction into the weekend.
Satellite and Radar Images: To view the cloud conditions we have here in Hawaii, please use the following satellite links, starting off with the Infrared Satellite Image of the islands to see all the clouds around the state during the day and night. This next image is one that gives close images of the islands only during the daytime hours, and is referred to as a Close-up visible image. This next image shows a larger view of the Pacific…giving perspective to the wider ranging cloud patterns in the Pacific Ocean. To help you keep track of where any showers may be around the islands, here’s the latest animated radar image.
Hawaii’s Mountains – Here’s a link to the live webcam on the summit of near 14,000 foot Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. The tallest peak on the island of Maui is the Haleakala Crater, which is near 10,000 feet in elevation. These two webcams are available during the daylight hours here in the islands…and when there’s a big moon rising just after sunset for an hour or two! Plus, during the nights and early mornings you will be able to see stars, and the sunrise too…depending upon weather conditions.
Aloha Paragraphs
The trade winds are back!
Photo Credit: flickr.com
Warmer trade winds have returned to the Hawaiian Islands, bringing improved weather…which will last through the rest of this week. The frontal cloud band that brought cool showery weather to Maui County and parts of Oahu lately, is quickly losing its form. The trade winds, as they fill back into the state, will blow in the light to moderately strong range at first. These trade winds will strengthen a bit more on Friday…losing a little strength later this coming weekend. As we move into early next week, the trade winds will carry another cloud band into the state, and become more gusty…continuing through most of next week.
The long lasting frontal cloud band, which kept Maui County and parts of Oahu wet this week…is now quickly moving out of our area. What’s left of the cloud band is being carried westward, pushed in that direction by the returning trade winds from the east. Here’s a looping radar image, so you can see those few lingering showers having shifted towards Oahu’s windward side…reaching Kauai during the evening hours perhaps. Our weather will be quite nice going foward, with a new cloud band bringing more showers early next week…falling generally along the windward sides however.
Our weather, after being somewhat lousy of late, has finally turned the corner back…towards the way everyone likes it again. I’m quite sure that just about everyone here in the islands is celebrating this change, which means warmer air temperatures. As the last remnants of the old frontal cloud band dissipate later today, conditions will move quickly back towards the fine weather, that Hawaii’s known for during the winter season. There will be a few passing showers along the windward sides…although the leeward sides will return to generally sunny conditions.
~~~ I’m just getting ready to leave Kihei, for the drive back upcountry. The weather here on Maui is just about perfect, with hardly any clouds in the sky…even over on the windward sides! The trade winds came back during the day, and seem to be a bit stronger than anticipated. At 5pm Thursday evening, the winds were gusting up to 31 mph at Maalaea Bay! We’re moving into a well established period of trade winds, which will last through the rest of this week, and likely most of next week. I’ll be back early Friday morning with your next new weather narrative. I hope you have a great Thursday night until then! Aloha for now…Glenn.
Interesting: Scientists seek to create reliable early warning systems that accurately estimate the magnitude of an earthquake within the first seconds of rupture. In a new paper published by the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, authors S. Murphy of University College Dublin, Ireland and S. Nielsen of the Instituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, Roma, Italy look at the idea that an earthquake’s final size can be determined during its initiation, rather than something that only becomes apparent at the end of the rupture. They found that, while this may be true over a small range of earthquake sizes, it is unlikely to hold for the larger magnitudes, limiting its applicability for early warning systems. Alternatively, the authors found that rapid magnitude estimation could be better explained in terms of what seismic stations capture of an earthquake in a few seconds.
This section is generally quite large and is dependent on the relative position of the station to the fault. Therefore using a number of seismic stations around an earthquake fault, as is the case in early warning systems, the size of the earthquake can be quickly estimated. This explanation shows a scaling between ground motion and final earthquake size similar to that observed from seismograms. The authors found that this relationship breaks down for very large earthquakes, i.e. earthquakes with a magnitude greater than 6.5. In these cases, the seismic stations no longer capture the edges of the fault in a few seconds due to the large area of the fault. When this happens, the authors suggest that early warning systems which use the peak ground displacement technique for estimating earthquake size, shall underestimate the size of the earthquake.
Interesting2: Despite the fact that most of us see our four-legged friends walking around every day, most of us-including many experts in natural history museums and illustrators for veterinary anatomy text books-apparently still don’t know how they do it. A new study published in the January 27th issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, shows that anatomists, taxidermists, and toy designers get the walking gait of horses and other quadruped animals wrong about half the time. That’s despite the fact that their correct walking behavior was described and published more than 120 years ago. "Our key finding is that the chance to find erroneous depictions of quadruped walking in our surrounding environment is about 50 percent, which corresponds to nothing else than pure accident," said Gábor Horváth of Eötvös University.
"This was quite unexpected because the experts of animal locomotion have known well the characteristics of quadruped walking ever since the famous and pioneering work of Eadweard Muybridge, published in the 1880s." So, then, how do they walk? It turns out that all four-legged animals step with their left hind leg followed by their left foreleg. Then they step with their right hind leg followed by the right foreleg, and so on. Animals differ from one another only in the timing of that stepping.
Interesting3: A seed bank that is trying to collect every type of plant in the world is now under threat from the global financial crisis, its director says. The Millennium Seed Bank Project aims to house all the 300,000 different plant species known to exist to ensure future biodiversity and protect a vital source of food and medicines, director Paul Smith said. The project is on track to collect 10 percent of the total by 2010 but the financial crisis is drying up funding, casting serious doubts on future collections, he said. Half the funding comes from the National Lottery, and the rest from corporate donations. But with businesses tightening their belts in the economic downturn and preparation for the 2012 London Olympics sapping lottery money, the pot is about to run dry. Smith hopes government money and international groups will come through with the nearly 10 million pounds per year needed to keep the bank going.
But if that does not happen, new collections and research will stop, he said. "We would say that this is an exceptional bank and that the assets within it, the capital that we have built up, is unique and we can’t squander this," Smith told Reuters Television during a tour of the facility south of London. Each seed costs about 2,000 pounds to collect and store. The Millennium Seed Bank Project is the only project of its kind in the world which aims to collect and conserve all the planet’s wild plant diversity, Smith said. Human activities, such as clearing forests, have put flora and fauna at risk. Because most of the world’s food and medicines come from nature, protecting plant species is critical, scientists say.
Interesting4: The team operating NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit plans diagnostic tests this week after Spirit did not report some of its weekend activities, including a request to determine its orientation after an incomplete drive. On Sunday, during the 1,800th Martian day, or sol, of what was initially planned as a 90-sol mission on Mars, information radioed from Spirit indicated the rover had received its driving commands for the day but had not moved. That can happen for many reasons, including the rover properly sensing that it is not ready to drive. However, other behavior on Sol 1800 was even more unusual: Spirit apparently did not record the day’s main activities into the non-volatile memory, the part of its memory that persists even when power is off.
On Monday, Spirit’s controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., chose to command the rover on Tuesday, Sol 1802, to find the sun with its camera in order to precisely determine its orientation. Not knowing its orientation could have been one possible explanation for Spirit not doing its weekend drive. Early Tuesday, Spirit reported that it had tried to follow the commands, but had not located the sun. "We don’t have a good explanation yet for the way Spirit has been acting for the past few days," said JPL’s Sharon Laubach, chief of the team that writes and checks commands for the rovers. "Our next steps will be diagnostic activities." Among other possible causes, the team is considering a hypothesis of transitory effects from cosmic rays hitting electronics. On Tuesday, Spirit apparently used its non-volatile memory properly.
Interesting5: Results from a large-scale Johns Hopkins study of more than 40 hospitals and 160,000 patients show that when health information technologies replace paper forms and handwritten notes, both hospitals and patients benefit strongly. "Patients appear safer and hospital bottom lines may improve when health care information is gathered and stored on computers rather than on paper," says senior author Neil R. Powe, M.D., M.P.H. M.B.A, of the Department of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and director of the Welch Center for Prevention, Epidemiology and Clinical Research. Powe, lead author Ruben Amarasingham, M.D., M.B.A. and colleagues rated clinical information technologies at 41 hospitals in Texas and compared those results with discharge information for 167,233 patients in a new study.
Amarasingham was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar in the Department of Medicine at Johns Hopkins the time the study began. "Previous studies only told us how well one particular electronic system used by one particular hospital worked," says Amarasingham. "This study gives us a better sense about the general success of paperless systems in a diverse set of community, academic and safety-net hospitals. We were also able to examine the many components contained in a hospital information system." Results showed that with computerized automation of notes and records, hospitals whose technologies ranked in the top third were associated with a 15 percent decrease in the odds that a patient would die while hospitalized.
Interesting6: It’s been nearly 20 years since Alaska’s Mount Redoubt erupted, but that time of tranquility might end. Recent seismic activity could be a prelude to an eruption, "perhaps within hours to days," said geologists from the Alaska Volcano Observatory. The 10,197-foot peak sits about 50 miles west of Kenai and 100 miles southwest of Anchorage. It last erupted during a five-month stretch beginning December, 1989. Recent activity began around 1 a.m. Sunday, then it eased about five hours later. It was still well above normal "background" tremor levels, said Dave Schneider, a volcanologist from the observatory. An observatory crew flew over Redoubt, and it ruled there had been no eruption. "There was steaming through pre-existing holes, but there were no new holes. … and there was no ash on the snow cover," he said.
But during the flyover, crew members smelled sulfur, so observatory staff will be monitoring activity and satellite images that identify temperature changes round the clock, Schneider said. Observers will also look to weather radar scanners near the Kenai airport for help. Those scanners send data in six-minute intervals. These scanners will be able to detect an ash plume should one appear, Schneider said. Twenty years ago, an eruption forced mud flows from Redoubt into the Drift River drainage. The flows also caused partial flooding of the Drift River Oil Terminal facility. Additionally, the ash plume disrupted international air traffic and a thin ash layer coated Anchorage and surrounding communities. Sunday’s volcanic activity came on the heels of a magnitude 5.7 earthquake at the mouth of Cook Inlet. However, Schneider said that does not necessarily mean the earthquake stirred the volcanic activity. With the two events being more than 100 miles apart, it’s even more unlikely, he said.
Interesting7: Scientists at the University of Liverpool have found that heating from carbon dioxide will increase five-fold over the next millennium. Scientists studied the impact that current carbon emissions have on the delicate balance between air and sea carbon exchange. They found that the ocean’s ability to store excessive amounts of carbon dioxide over thousands of years will affect the long-term heating of the planet. The ocean acts as an enormous carbon sink which naturally absorbs any extra carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere. Its ability to store more carbon dioxide than both the atmosphere and land provides long-term storage for the carbon dioxide emitted by human activities.
Scientists at Liverpool, however, have found that if all conventional coal, oil and gas carbon reserves are exhausted, the excessive amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will begin to alter the ocean’s natural chemistry and hinder its ability to absorb and exchange the gas. Professor Ric Williams, from the University’s School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, explains: “It is accepted that rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations lead to an increase in heating around the globe. It was, however, unclear as to how the ocean’s ability to store carbon could affect the future overall heating of the earth.
Interesting8: The temperature soared over 110 degrees F again on Thursday in southern Australia from southeastern South Australia to many parts of Victoria. In Melbourne, Victoria’s capital, the high of 112 degrees F on Thursday made it the third hottest day on record; it was also 34 degrees above average for the date. The highest temperature registered in Melbourne is 114 degrees on Jan. 13, 1939. At Melbourne’s airport, the temperature was no lower than 87 degrees on Wednesday night; this mark is fully 30 degrees above the average daily low in late January. Thursday was even hotter in some locations near Melbourne. Both Avalon and Geelong soared to 114 degrees F. In South Australia, Adelaide, the state capital, spiked to 110 degrees F, or about 25 degrees above average.
Interesting9: It generates an incredible 1,000 horsepower. Goes zero to 60 mph in a hair-raising 2.5 seconds. Top speed is 208 mph. Now hold on to your seat for the real news: The Ultimate Aero EV is electric. Manufacturer Shelby aims for it to be the world’s fastest electric car. And yes, it was made to prove a point: that green can be mean. Detroit, are you listening? Other details, the company claims:
• Range: 150-200 miles on a single charge.
• Charge time: As little as 10 minutes.
• Transmission: 3-speed automatic.
Ultimate Aero EV deliveries will start as early as fourth quarter 2009, the company said in a statement. The Tesla Roadster, already in production, goes zero to 60 in a not-to-shabby 3.9 seconds. Tesla is the brainchild of Elon Musk, a co-founder of SpaceX, which is developing a new breed of commercial space rockets. Unlike gas engines, which are comparatively sluggish, electric motors supply 100 percent torque from the get-go, as anyone who ever played with slot cars as a kid can recall. Tesla’s web sit describes the difference this way: "A favorite trick here at Tesla Motors is to invite a passenger along and ask him to turn on the radio. At the precise moment we ask, we accelerate. Our passenger simply can’t sit forward enough to reach the dials.
Interesting10: The world’s glaciers thinned by an average of almost 29 inches in 2007, indicating that they are melting twice as fast this decade as during the 1980s and 1990s, Swiss scientists said Thursday. The World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich regularly measures 80 glaciers around the globe. It found that some Alpine glaciers lost as much as 10 feet of ice cover, while coastal glaciers in Norway actually thickened in 2007. The rate of decline was less than in 2006, according to Michael Zemp, one of the scientists involved.
But 2007 was the sixth year this decade that the glaciers lost on average more than 20 inches thickness. "This means that the rate of melting during the 1980s and 1990s has more than doubled," Zemp said. The 30 glaciers that have been measured the longest have thinned by an average of 40 feet since 1980, he said. Glacial thickness is directly influenced by the weather during the previous year, while glacier length is considered by scientists to be an indication of long-term climate trends.
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