February 19-20, 2009
Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Thursday afternoon:
Lihue, Kauai – 73
Honolulu, Oahu – 78
Kaneohe, Oahu – 75
Kahului, Maui – 74
Hilo, Hawaii – 75
Kailua-kona – 85
Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level, and on the highest mountains…at 4 p.m. Thursday afternoon:
Honolulu, Oahu – 77F
Hilo, Hawaii – 66
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:
1.29 Mount Waialaele, Kauai
1.83 Oahu Forest NWR, Oahu
0.33 Molokai
0.23 Lanai
0.35 Kahoolawe
2.13 West Wailuaiki, Maui
1.40 Honokaa, Big Island
Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a very strong 1044 millibar high pressure system located very far to the north-northwest of the islands, with low pressure cells positioned to the NE…which will cause breezy and cool northeast winds both Friday and Saturday.
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
Cool weather…with lots of clouds, and NE winds
Photo Credit: flickr.com
The airflow coming into the Hawaiian Islands remains out of the northeast…bringing cool temperatures through Friday. These more northerly breezes are strong enough Thursday evening to require small craft wind advisories over all Hawaiian waters. As we move into the weekend, our winds will veer back around to the east-northeast and east. These more classic trade winds will bring warmer air with them. Looking ahead into next week, we see a very strong high pressure system settling into the area north of Hawaii by mid-week…triggering blustery trade winds over the following days.
There continues to be periods of high cirrus clouds, along with lower level stratocumulus clouds over the islands…dimming our sunshine during the days. The combination of all these clouds around, and the cooler than normal air coming our way on the NE winds…will keep a tropical cool snap in place into Friday. There won’t be all that many showers falling, and most of those will concentrate their efforts most effectively along the north and east facing windward coasts and slopes. The leeward sides will feel cool too, shaded by those sun dimming high clouds at times.
It’s Thursday evening as I begin writing this last section of today’s narrative. As expected, the afternoon high temperatures around the state Thursday remained below 80F degrees everywhere. The one exception, which turned out to be rather significant…was the very warm 85 degree maximum temperature in Kona! This was due to the blocking of the winds, by the tall mountains on that island. Here’s a looping satellite image showing icy cirrus 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 continue to see those stratocumulus clouds.
~~~ This wintery weather aspect will hang around through Friday. As we move into the weekend, we should see more sunshine, and warmer easterly trade winds returning. All the strong winds offshore to the northeast of us, over in the eastern Pacific, will start rough surf pounding our north through easterly facing beaches. These waves will be large enough Friday, that high surf conditions will exist there. Looking a big further ahead, early next week the computer models show a very strong 1040 millibar high pressure system moving into the area north of our islands. Actually, a bit later in the week, that high pressure jumps all the way up to the 1048 millbar level…which is exceptional! This will bring about a new surge of strong to very strong trade winds then.
~~~ Here in Kihei, Maui, before I leave for the drive upcountry to Kula, it is partly cloudy out the window at around 530pm. It was very breezy during the day along this south coast, with dust flying around, and the coconut palm trees swaying sideways but good! I see lots of low clouds over towards the windward sides, with generally light showers falling at Kahului and Kapalua…as well as Hilo and Kamuela, both on the Big Island. Here’s a looping radar image so you can check out just where the showers are falling tonight into Friday morning. You can certainly see the northeast direction, from NE to SW, that the blustery winds are carrying these showers through the island chain. The nature of our precipitation regime should keep most of these showers on the light side.
~~~ Ok, I’m out of here, ready to jump in the car and drive. Before I go though, I want to mention again that later next week, we may see strong and gusty trade winds, perhaps even very strong trade winds, along with wet conditions moving our way. This isn’t an absolutely sure thing, with still some wiggle room involved with the computer model output over the next several days. At any rate, I trust that you are enjoying the interesting news stories below, I know that I’m finding them educational. Again, I want to thank you for joining me here online, and for clicking around on the google ads when you have the interest and time. I’ll be back again early Friday morning with your next new weather narrative, I hope you have a great Thursday night until then! Aloha for now…Glenn.
Interesting: A new University of Florida study based on DNA analysis from living flowering plants shows that the ancestors of most modern trees diversified extremely rapidly 90 million years ago, ultimately leading to the formation of forests that supported similar evolutionary bursts in animals and other plants. This burst of speciation over a 5-million-year span was one of three major radiations of flowering plants, known as angiosperms. The study focuses on diversification in the rosid clade, a group with a common ancestor that now accounts for one-third of the world’s flowering plants. The forests that resulted provided the habitat that supported later evolutionary diversifications for amphibians, ants, placental mammals and ferns.
"Shortly after the angiosperm-dominated forests diversified, we see this amazing diversification in other lineages, so they basically set the habitat for all kinds of new things to arise," said Pamela Soltis, study co-author and curator of molecular systematics and evolutionary genetics at UF’s Florida Museum of Natural History. "Associated with some of the subsequent radiations is even the diversification of the primates." The study appearing online in next week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is the first to show the evolutionary relationships of these plants and provide evidence for their rapid emergence and diversification.
Interesting2: The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to act for the first time to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that scientists blame for the warming of the planet, according to top Obama administration officials. The decision, which most likely would play out in stages over a period of months, would have a profound impact on transportation, manufacturing costs and how utilities generate power. It could accelerate the progress of energy and climate change legislation in Congress and form a basis for the United States’ negotiating position at United Nations climate talks set for December in Copenhagen.
The environmental agency is under order from the Supreme Court to make a determination whether carbon dioxide is a pollutant that endangers public health and welfare, an order that the Bush administration essentially ignored despite near-unanimous belief among agency experts that research points inexorably to such a finding. Lisa P. Jackson, the new E.P.A. administrator, said in an interview that she had asked her staff to review the latest scientific evidence and prepare the documentation for a so-called endangerment finding. Ms. Jackson said she had not decided to issue such a finding but she pointedly noted that the second anniversary of the Supreme Court decision, Massachusetts v. E.P.A., is April 2, and there is the wide expectation that she will act by then.
Interesting3: Computers, mobile phones and other electronic devices regularly download software updates to keep obsolescence at bay. That’s not the norm for cars. But that could change thanks to an automotive software architecture developed by European researchers to keep vehicles up to date with the latest technology. Developed over two and a half years by a consortium of research institutes, software companies, vehicle manufacturers and parts suppliers, the architecture represents a fundamental building block for an intelligent car able to reconfigure and update itself autonomously, as well as communicate with other devices, such as the driver’s mobile phone or PDA.
“The architecture is the basis for a kind of adaptable onboard operating system… but one that’s much more robust than what is on your PC,” says Martin Sanfridson, a researcher at Volvo Technology in Sweden and the coordinator of the EU-funded DySCAS project in which the architecture was developed. By using middleware solutions – software that allows different systems to interoperate – the DySCAS architecture could allow the car’s onboard navigation system to automatically access addresses on the driver’s PDA to save them from having to be input manually, or it could play music directly from their mobile phone.
More importantly, it would make installing new features and components or changing existing ones considerably easier. “Cars take many years to develop and most are designed to be on the road for perhaps a decade. In that time, technology can change a lot, but currently there is no efficient way to update the software in these vehicles,” explains Sanfridson. An obvious example of the technological lag is onboard entertainment. Car companies were still putting cassette players in vehicles ten years ago, even though they had been superseded by CDs and they are still putting CD players in cars today as MP3 players overtake the market. In a rapidly changing and increasingly networked environment, in-car entertainment systems will probably need to be frequently updated in the future in order to keep up with new formats.
Interesting4: New research suggests that blocking the activity of a protein in the blood could offer powerful protection against some skin cancers. In the study, normal mice and mice that had a genetically engineered protein deficiency were exposed to almost a year of ultraviolet light that mimics chronic sun exposure. The mice that lacked the protein developed fewer, smaller, less aggressive and less vascular skin cancer tumors than did the normal mice.
Because a low-dose drug that blocks the protein’s activity in the blood is currently under investigation by a Pennsylvania pharmaceutical company, the researchers hope that someday, a simple pill might help prevent or treat non-melanoma skin cancer in people at highest risk for the disease. More than 1 million cases of nonmelanoma skin cancer are diagnosed in the United States each year, according to the National Cancer Institute. The two most common types are basal cell carcinoma, which forms in small cells in the base of the outer layer of skin, and squamous cell carcinoma, which forms in cells that compose the surface of the skin.
Intersting5: A small but important uptick in electrical output from the solar panels on NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit this month indicates a beneficial Martian wind has blown away some of the dust that has accumulated on the panels. The cleaning boosts Spirit’s daily energy supply by about 30 watt-hours, to about 240 watt-hours from 210 watt-hours. The rover uses about 180 watt-hours per day for basic survival and communications, so this increase roughly doubles the amount of discretionary power for activities such as driving and using instruments. Thirty watt-hours is the amount of energy used to light a 30-watt bulb for one hour. "We will be able to use this energy to do significantly more driving," said Colette Lohr, a rover mission manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "Our drives have been averaging about 50 minutes, and energy has usually been the limiting factor. We may be able to increase that to drives of an hour and a half." Spirit has driven about 9 meters (about 30 feet) since getting around a rock that temporarily blocked its progress on Jan. 31.
The team’s goal in coming weeks is to navigate the rover over or around a low plateau called "Home Plate" to get to an area targeted for scientific studies on the other side of Home Plate. JPL’s Jennifer Herman, a rover team engineer, found the first evidence for the new cleaning event in engineering data from the Martian day 1,812 of Spirit’s mission on the Red Planet (Feb. 6, 2009) and confirmed it from the following two days’ data. Before the event, dust buildup on the solar array had reached the point where only 25 percent of sunlight hitting the array was getting past the dust to be used by the photovoltaic cells. Afterwards, that increased to 28 percent. "It may not sound like a lot, but it is an important increase," Herman said.
Interesting6: Elderly adults tend to live longer if their homes are near a park or other green space, regardless of their social or economic status. College students do better on cognitive tests when their dorm windows view natural settings. Children with ADHD have fewer symptoms after outdoor activities in lush environments. Residents of public housing complexes report better family interactions when they live near trees. These are only a few of the findings from recent studies that support the idea that nature is essential to the physical, psychological and social well-being of the human animal, said Frances Kuo, a professor of natural resources and environmental science and psychology at the University of Illinois. Kuo will present her own and other findings on the subject at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago on Feb. 13, 2009.
“Humans are evolved organisms and the environment is our habitat,” Kuo said. “Now, as human societies become more urban, we as scientists are in a position to look at humans in much the same way that those who study animal behavior have looked at animals in the wild to see the effect of a changing habitat on this species.” Humans living in landscapes that lack trees or other natural features undergo patterns of social, psychological and physical breakdown that are strikingly similar to those observed in other animals that have been deprived of their natural habitat, Kuo said. “In animals what you see is increases in aggression, you see disrupted parenting patterns, their social hierarchies are disrupted,” she said. Considerable research has found that violence and aggression are highest in urban settings devoid of trees and grass, for example.
Interesting7: The Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits, part of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County family of museums, has announced an endeavor of discovery and research so enormous that it could potentially rewrite the scientific account of the world-famous La Brea Tar Pits and their surrounding area—one of the richest sources of life in the last Ice Age, approximately 40,000 to 10,000 years ago. Project 23: New Discoveries at Rancho La Brea, undertaken in the heart of urban Los Angeles, has to date uncovered over 700 measured specimens including a large pre-historic American Lion skull, lion bones, dire wolves, saber-toothed cats, juvenile horse and bison, teratorn, coyotes, lynx, and ground sloths.
Most rare of all is a well-preserved male Columbian mammoth fossil, about 80% complete, with 10-feet long intact tusks found in an ancient river bed near the other discoveries. This latter fossil is the first complete individual mammoth to have been found in Rancho La Brea. In recognition of the importance of the find, paleontologists at the Page Museum have nicknamed the mammoth “Zed.” “The name signifies the beginning of a new era of research and discovery,” according to Dr. John Harris, Chief Curator, Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits. “Zed is a symbol of the potential of Project 23 to revolutionize our knowledge about this area.”
Interesting8: Globally, tropical trees in undisturbed forest are absorbing nearly a fifth of the CO2 released by burning fossil fuels. The researchers show that remaining tropical forests remove a massive 4.8 billion tons of CO2 emissions from the atmosphere each year. This includes a previously unknown carbon sink in Africa, mopping up 1.2 billion tons of CO2 each year. Published today in Nature, the 40 year study of African tropical forests–one third of the world’s total tropical forest–shows that for at least the last few decades each hectare of intact African forest has trapped an extra 0.6 tons of carbon per year. The scientists then analyzed the new African data together with South American and Asian findings to assess the total sink in tropical forests.
Analysis of these 250,000 tree records reveals that, on average, remaining undisturbed forests are trapping carbon, showing that they are a globally significant carbon sink. "We are receiving a free subsidy from nature," says Dr Simon Lewis, a Royal Society research fellow at the University of Leeds, and the lead author of the paper. "Tropical forest trees are absorbing about 18% of the CO2 added to the atmosphere each year from burning fossil fuels, substantially buffering the rate of climate change." The reason why the trees are getting bigger and mopping up carbon is unclear. A leading suspect is the extra CO2 in the atmosphere itself, which may be acting like a fertilizer. However, Dr Lewis warns, "Whatever the cause, we cannot rely on this sink forever. Even if we preserve all remaining tropical forest, these trees will not continue getting bigger indefinitely."
Interesting9: Areas with lowland permafrost are likely to shrink in northern Sweden. Warmer summers and more winter precipitation are two of the reasons. This is shown in a new dissertation from Lund University in Sweden. Permafrost is ground that is frozen year round at least two years in a row. North of the Arctic Circle permafrost is common due to the cold climate. For several years, physical geographer Margareta Johansson at Lund University has studied lowland permafrost in peat mires surrounding Abisko. Permafrost is on the edge of its range there. Johansson states that permafrost is being affected by climate changes. “At one of our sites, permafrost has completely disappeared from the greater part of the mire during the last decade,” she says.
In areas where permafrost is thawing the ground becomes unstable and can collapse. This can be a local and regional problem in areas with cities and infrastructure. Moreover, the thaw can cause increased emissions of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane from the ground. Roughly 25 percent of all land surface in the northern hemisphere are underlain by permafrost. The thawing of permafrost that occurs today is likely to continue, in Margareta Johansson’s view. She regards it as probable that there will be no permafrost in lowland areas around Abisko in 50 years. “With the present climate it is likely that the changes seen in permafrost in the Abisko area will also occur in other areas, and my study can therefore provide a basis for studies in other geographic areas that are next in line,” she says.
Interesting10: There are about ten thousand billion billion habitable planets in the observable universe, and some of these Earth-like worlds could be found by a mission set to launch early next month, a leading planet-formation theorist now speculates. Alan Boss, astrophysicist at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., and author of "The Crowded Universe" (Basic Books), published this month, came up with that rough number by estimating there is about one habitable planet around every sun-like star in the galaxy, of which there are about 10 billion, and multiplying that by the number of galaxies in the universe (about 100 billion). This result is inexact of course, so give or take a power of ten or so, Boss said, which is standard for these types of estimates in astronomy.
"Based on what we already know, the universe is going to turn out to be chock full of habitable planets (i.e. Earth-like worlds), and therefore life is likely to be widespread," said Boss, who discussed these estimates with a group of reporters last weekend in Chicago at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. To date, precisely zero of these other Earths have been found. Technology simply has not allowed their discovery, presuming they exist. But astronomers are closing in. In the past nearly 15 years, more than 300 planets have been found around stars beyond the sun. Three classes of planets have been found, for the most part — Jupiter-like gas giants, Neptune-like icy planets and hot "super-Earths."
Such super-Earths, such as one reported by the Carnegie Institution’s Paul Butler in 2004 around Gliese 436 and another reported the same year by Barbara McArthur of the University around 55 Cancri, have masses of about five to 10 times that of Earth and exist around one-third of all nearby stars like our sun, Boss figures. This estimate is based on the results of ongoing planet-search efforts using the gravitational tug of planets on stars to detect worlds, called the Doppler approach, he said. Most of these super-Earths are too hot to support life, but Boss thinks there are warm super-Earths, with longer period orbits and more suitable for life.
Examples are two warm or cool super-Earths reported in 2007 by Stephane Udry and his colleagues on the Geneva Observatory to be orbiting Gliese 581. And, some of the icy planets might turn out to be rocky planets similar in composition to Earth, only more massive, Boss said. "We already know from folks who have been finding planets around other stars that most stars have planets," he said, adding that "simply from a theoretical ground of understanding how stars form, it’s almost inevitable that they should end up having disks around them which should end up forming planets. So we expect them to be there from the point of view of theory as well."
Email Glenn James: