February 18-19, 2009
Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Wednesday afternoon:
Lihue, Kauai – 74
Honolulu, Oahu – 81
Kaneohe, Oahu – 77
Kahului, Maui – 80
Hilo, Hawaii – 77
Kailua-kona – 80
Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level, and on the highest mountains…at 4 p.m. Wednesday afternoon:
Kailua-kona – 78F
Lihue, Kauai – 70
Haleakala Crater – 48 (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 36 (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:
0.64 Mount Waialaele, Kauai
0.21 Oahu Forest NWR, Oahu
0.08 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.00 Kahoolawe
0.29 West Wailuaiki, Maui
0.32 Pahoa, Big Island
Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a 1031 millibar high pressure system located to the north-northwest of the islands, with low pressure cells positioned to the NE…which will cause breezy and cool northeast winds both 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 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. Finally, here’s a looping IR satellite image, making viewable the clouds around the islands 24 hours a day. To help you keep track of where any showers may be around the islands, here’s the latest animated radar image.
Hawaii’s Mountains – Here’s a link to the live webcam on the summit of near 14,000 foot Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. The tallest peak on the island of Maui is the Haleakala Crater, which is near 10,000 feet in elevation. These two webcams are available during the daylight hours here in the islands…and when there’s a big moon rising just after sunset for an hour or two! Plus, during the nights and early mornings you will be able to see stars, and the sunrise too…depending upon weather conditions.
Aloha Paragraphs
Hamoa Beach…near Hana, Maui
Photo Credit: flickr.com
Cooler northeast winds have begun blowing Wednesday…which will likely remain around into Friday. We still have small craft wind advisory flags up over part of the state Wednesday evening, although now only in those windiest areas…generally in the southern part of the state. As we move further into the week, towards the second half of the upcoming weekend, these NE breezes will shift back to the regular easterly trade wind direction…bringing warmer weather our way.
Cooler weather, with more clouds and windward biased showers into Thursday…along with some high cirrus clouds too. The leeward sides in contrast, will remain dry, although will be locally quite breezy. The high clouds will likely move away by Friday, giving us back our sunshine. There will be sunny periods along the leeward beaches, especially during those breaks in the high cloud periods.
It’s Wednesday evening as I begin writing this last narrative paragraph from here in Kihei, Maui. The cooler northeast winds arrived this afternoon, which kept our high temperatures a bit lower as expected. Looking out the window before I make the drive up to Kula, I see lots of high cirrus clouds. Here’s a satellite image showing those icy clouds streaming their way up from the deeper tropics to our southwest. Meanwhile, coming in from the opposite direction, at lower levels of the atmosphere, we have a fairly minor cloud band, an old cold front, bringing a few showers to the windward sides. The combination of northeast winds, the high clouds, and the lower level cloud band moving through the state…will give us a tropical cool snap for a couple of days. The showers moving into the state won’t amount to much, but there will be more clouds blocking the sunshine along the windward coasts and slopes.
~~~ All this wind coming in from the northeast now, will be blowing on the ocean surface…making rough and choppy surf break along our windward sides soon. We may see a high surf advisory flag go up along those areas over the next day or two. The winds coming in from the northeast direction have a tendency to accelerate through valleys. This will make the central valley on Maui a windy place, which sends strong and gusty winds shooting out through Maalaea Bay. These winds often blow down through the Kihei and Wailea areas too, which give the ocean surf lots of white caps, taking the glassy water away, especially during the afternoon hours.
~~~ I’ll be back early Thursday morning with your next new weather narrative. I trust that you’re enjoying the interesting news stories that I place below each weekday morning. I hope you have a great Wednesday night, and hopefully will be inclined to return on Thursday for another perusal of this website. By the way, thanks for showing interest in the advertising links on the left hand margins of all the pages, and also for those google ads on the top and the bottom of the pages as well. Aloha for now…Glenn.
Interesting: The economy isn’t just squeezing the middle class on land, it’s also affecting fish. Wealthy areas and least developed regions have healthiest fish populations, while those in the middle are suffering. According to a study by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and other organizations, researchers discovered a surprising correlation between "middle class" communities in Eastern Africa and low fish levels. Curiously, areas with both low and high socio-economic levels had comparatively higher fish levels.
Appearing in the latest edition of Current Biology, the study examined reef systems, human population densities, and socio-economics among villages in 30 fished and unfished study sites in five countries along Africa’s Indian Ocean coast. The study is by Josh Cinner of James Cook University (JCU), Tim McClanahan of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), Tim Daw of the University of East Anglia, Nick Graham of JCU, Joseph Maina of WCS, and Shaun Wilson and Terry Hughes of JCU. In a comparison between villages, researchers found that communities with intermediate levels of infrastructure had the lowest fish levels in their adjacent reef systems—up to four times lower than sites of low and high levels of development.
"This is a significant finding on how socio-economics can influence reef fisheries in surprising ways," said Dr. Tim McClanahan, a WCS coral researcher and co-author of the study. "It also shows the importance of combining ecology with social science for conservation planning on a regional scale." The explanation, said researchers, lies in the interplay between traditional customs and how growth influences the social fabric of communities. In poor communities, many of which rely heavily on marine resources, fishing levels are kept in check by local cultural institutions and taboos and a reliance on traditional, low-tech fishing methods. Increases in wealth often reduce a community’s dependence on fishing, but it can also increase the number of motorized fishing vessels and fishing gear such as hand lines.
Interesting2: Powered only by natural sunlight, an array of nano-tubes is able to convert a mixture of carbon dioxide and water vapor into natural gas at unprecedented rates. Such devices offer a new way to take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and convert it into fuel or other chemicals to cut the effect of fossil fuel emissions on global climate, says Craig Grimes, from Pennsylvania State University, whose team came up with the device.
Although other research groups have developed methods for converting carbon dioxide into organic compounds like methane, often using titanium-dioxide nano-particles as catalysts, they have needed ultraviolet light to power the reactions. The researchers’ breakthrough has been to develop a method that works with the wider range of visible frequencies within sunlight.
Interesting3: The cruise ship Ocean Nova, with 106 people on board, was to attempt again Wednesday to free itself after running aground a day earlier near an Argentine military base in Antarctica. Amid strong winds, the ship awaited the arrival of another cruise ship to which its passengers might be evacuated. Passengers were in good condition and out of danger, Patrick Shaw, chairman of the company Quark Expeditions which operates the Ocean Nova, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa. Shaw noted that the ship’s hull suffered no damage in the accident. The Ocean Nova, sailing under the Bahamas flag, ran aground early Tuesday just three miles off the Argentine military base San Martin, in the area known as Bahia Margarita.
Former Danish Navy seaman Per Gravesen, the ship’s captain, decided to wait for high tide to try and get the ship out of trouble by its own means. An attempt was made in the early hours of Wednesday, but failed. "The maneuvers turned out to be insufficient, so the ship remains aground in the same place," the Argentine Navy said in a statement. The captain was to try again later, at the next high tide. "If he makes it and the hull suffered no damage, passengers can continue their 15-day journey," Shaw said. In case the renewed attempt also fails, passengers were to be evacuated to the cruise ship Clipper Adventure, also operated by Quark Expeditions and which is already in the area, to take them to Argentina’s southernmost town, Ushuaia.
Interesting4: The bird-flu virus is nearly entrenched in China’s poultry population and represents a threat to world health, UN experts said Wednesday. "It has the potential for a pandemic," said Hans Troedsson, the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) representative in China, which has the world’s largest poultry population. He told journalists in Beijing after China reported five human bird-flu deaths so far this year that health experts were concerned about the breadth and intensity in China of poultry infections of H5N1, the strain of bird flu that can be deadly in humans.
Most human H5N1 infections have occurred after patients have had close contact with infected birds, but health experts fear the virus could mutate into a form that could easily be passed between humans and cause a worldwide pandemic. "It is posing a pandemic risk," Troedsson said of the bird-flu outbreak in China’s poultry. "No one can escape it," he added.
"It will strike the whole world." A warning to China of a pandemic also came from another UN agency, the Food and Agricultural Organization. "We should not be complacent," said Vincent Martin, an animal health adviser from the organization. "If it happens, it will be very scary for everyone."He called for bird-flu prevention and investigations into how the virus spreads, warning that it was evolving.
The experts said they were also concerned that the most recent human infections in China were widely distributed across the country and could not be linked to nearby outbreaks of bird flu among poultry. WHO has confirmed 407 human bird-flu cases since 2003 in 15 Asian and African countries, 254 of which were fatal. China has seen 26 deaths from 39 cases, eight of which occurred this year.
Interesting5: Most of California isn’t falling into the sea yet, but big parts of Alaska are. In a possible sign of things to come, erosion of a stretch of Alaska’s coast surged in recent years to more than double the average historical rate, threatening some towns, a new study finds. The loss of land is documented in photos that show newly collapsed sections of permafrost coastline as well as decades-old artifacts that have slipped into the sea.
Scientists caution that the study does not include the entire coastline, but they said the shift might be due to declining Arctic sea ice extent, increasing summertime sea-surface temperatures, the rising sea level, and increases in storm power and corresponding wave action. "These factors may be leading to a new era in ocean-land interactions that seem to be repositioning and reshaping the Arctic coastline," the scientists write in the Feb. 14 issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Interesting6: Dreams might mean nothing, but many people take them seriously nonetheless, as Sigmund Freud did, new research finds. People in at least three countries, including the United States, believe dreams contain important hidden truths, said researcher Carey Morewedge, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
In six different studies, Morewedge and his colleagues surveyed nearly 1,100 people about their dreams. The results are detailed in the February issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. "Psychologists’ interpretations of the meaning of dreams vary widely," Morewedge said.
"But our research shows that people believe their dreams provide meaningful insight into themselves and their world." In one study that surveyed general beliefs about dreams, Morewedge and co-author Michael Norton, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, surveyed 149 university students in the United States, India and South Korea.
The researchers asked the students to rate different theories about dreams. Across all three cultures, an overwhelming majority of the students endorsed the theory that dreams reveal hidden truths about themselves and the world, a belief also endorsed by a nationally representative sample of Americans, Morewedge said.
Interesting7: Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou on Wednesday pledged to help the Pacific island of Tuvalu, which is threatened by rising water levels caused by global warming. Ma made the pledge while receiving Tuvalu’s Prime Minister Apisai Ielemia whose country of 26 square kilometers and 12,000 people is slowly sinking due to rising sea levels. "Tuvalu has opened diplomatic ties with our country for 30 years and has spoken out in support of our country on many international occasions. It is a firm ally of the Republic of China (Taiwan’s formal title)," the Presidential Office quoted Ma as saying. Ma said rising sea levels have already had a serious impact on the life of Tuvalu people. "Our country and Tuvalu have had friendly ties for a long time.
I hope our two countries can strengthen our bond, cooperate and promote our friendship," he said. The news release did not mention what kind of aid Taiwan will give Tuvalu to help the island state cope with rising sea levels. Tuvalu is among the 23 mostly-small nations that recognize Taiwan. More than 170 countries recognize China which sees Taiwan as its breakaway province. Tuvalu consists of six atolls and three islands which are about 4.5 meters above the sea, and some of its beaches have already disappeared under the sea.
Interesting8: The price of staple grains like wheat, rice and maize have been climbing since January, after falling from record levels at the same time in 2008, according to the latest Crop Prospects and Food Situation report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Wheat prices are being pushed up because a smaller wheat harvest is expected from Argentina, a major producer, where government has suspended export permits. Rice prices have begun to climb since Thailand, the largest world’s exporter, diverted some 4 million tons from the market and into public inventories at a price reported to be 20 percent higher than market levels. Maize prices are volatile because of dry conditions in Argentina and Brazil and a lower demand for US maize.
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