March 12-13, 2009
Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Thursday afternoon:
Lihue, Kauai – 70
Honolulu, Oahu – 76
Kaneohe, Oahu – 72
Kahului, Maui – 71
Hilo, Hawaii – 76
Kailua-kona – 79
Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level – and on the highest mountains…at 4 p.m. Thursday afternoon:
Kailua-kona – 75F
Hilo, Hawaii – 64
Haleakala Crater – 34 (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:
2.69 Kokee, Kauai
1.98 Makaha Stream, Oahu
0.75 Molokai
0.14 Lanai
0.00 Kahoolawe
1.40 West Wailuaiki, Maui
1.22 Honokaa, Big Island
Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing high pressure systems located to the northwest and northeast of the islands. Meanwhile, we have a developing storm low pressure system to the north. Our winds will be north to NW, gusty and cool into 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
Hanging loose…Hawaii
Photo Credit: flickr.com
Thursday was an especially cool day here in the islands, with breezy north winds keeping a chill in the air. The NWS forecast office in Honolulu has issued a small craft wind advisory for all coastal and channel waters…across the entire state. We now find a high surf advisory for the north and east facing shores, as rough seas will pound those beaches. These heavy seas will cause surges to enter into the Kahului and Hilo harbors. Finally, the north winds atop the mountains on the Big island will be strong enough to have initiated a wind advisory. The winds this coming weekend are still a little up in the air as far as direction goes, although will likely be somewhat lighter, and may be coming from a more unusual NW or even westerly direction then.
The fast moving cold front, which swept down through the island chain Thursday, bringing showers along with it…is now passing south of the Big Island. The bulk of the showers have fallen along the north facing coasts and slopes, and in the mountains…although some leeward areas got wet too. A low pressure system will arrive in the area north of our islands Friday into the weekend. As this low gets into place, we’ll see unsettled weather popping-up at times. Depending upon where the low ends up, will help determine where its showers will be falling…there remains some uncertainty about that now.
The cold front spoken of in the paragraph above, had passed over Kauai, Oahu and Molokai Thursday morning…then Maui and the Big Island during the afternoon hours. Shower activity will drop off with the passing of the front, with drier air flooding into the island area in the wake of the front’s passage. The main influence, behind the front, will be the chilly north winds, which will continue into Friday. Here’s a satellite image, so you can see where the ragged leading edge is…and the still cloudy skies behind it too.
The big question continues to be where the low pressure system, that will move to the north of Hawaii…will eventually end up this weekend. There’s a good chance that it will just stall to our north, which will cause our north winds to calm down. We could see periods of showers rotating around the low, bringing rainfall to us at times. If on the other hand, it were to move further west, to the west of Kauai, then that could prompt heavier rains. This is still up in the air, and we will have to wait another day or two before this gets resolved…stay tuned.
It’s early Thursday evening here in Kihei, Maui, as I begin writing this last part of today’s narrative. The fast paced cold front has moved past the Big island at this time. Here’s a looping radar image, so you can see the leftover showers riding along in the more or less northto NNW wind flow. The main thing today has been the cloudy skies, and the chilly winds. Those winds were locally very gusty today, with the strongest that I saw occurring at Barking Sands, on Kauai…where was 44 mph during the afternoon hours. At the moment, at 515pm, the strongest I see is 42 mph on the small island of Kahoolawe. Air temperatures are anything but warm at the moment, with the range being 75F degrees at Kailual-kona, with a cooler 64 degrees on the other end of the island chain, at Lihue, Kauai. This is winter, tropical style, which I must say I’m enjoying very much. I know that it won’t be long before we’re back in a regular old warm weather pattern, so I’m finding it unique and very interesting.
I’m heading up to Kula, in the upcountry area here on Maui now. Here in Kihei, it’s partly cloudy and breezy. I’m pretty sure that I’ll be putting my windshield wipers on before I get home. I’ll come back online when I get back, and let you know what the temperature is up there. I’ll also let you know what the weather is like at home too. I’m sure, as I did this morning, that I’ll be putting my rain jacket on, before heading out for what could be a wet walk. ~~~ Hi again, just before leaving Kihei my friend, who is having the health issues, asked if I could stop by on the way home. It’s now 815pm, and I just got home. It’s freezing, well not exactly, but sure it’s sure cold for this early, 52F degrees…and lightly misting outside. I’m going to jump underneath my down comforter now, and do some reading, and get warm, before I go to sleep. I’ll meet you here early Friday morning, when I’ll pry myself out of bed, and prepare your next new weather narrative. It will be fun to get back on the computer, and for sure I’ll let you know what the air temperature is again then. Aloha for now…Glenn.
One more thing, if you have left me a response in the reply box, down the page from here, and you can’t find it…or my answer, here’s what to do: go to the left hand margin of this page, and find where it says "Other Useful Links", and from there scroll down to where it says Archived Narratives. If you click there, you can go back to the previous day, where you’ll find what you wrote, and what I wrote back at the bottom of that page. By the way, from there you can go back and find any narrative that I’ve written, over the last almost three years! This includes all the interesting news articles (like the ones below) that I have posted over the last several months, and more…too.
Interesting: As California officials see it, global warming is happening so there’s no time to waste in figuring out what to do. California’s interagency Climate Action Team on Wednesday issued the first of 40 reports on impacts and adaptation, outlining what the state’s residents must do to deal with the floods, erosion and other effects expected from rising sea levels.
Hundreds of thousands of people and billions of dollars of Golden State infrastructure and property would be at risk if ocean levels rose 55 inches by the end of the century, as computer models suggest, according to the report. The group floated several radical proposals: limit coastal development in areas at risk from sea rise; consider phased abandonment of certain areas; halt federally subsidized insurance for property likely to be inundated; and require coastal structures to be built to adapt to climate change.
"Immediate action is needed," said Linda Adams, secretary for environmental protection. "It will cost significantly less to combat climate change than it will to maintain a business-as-usual approach." Few topics are likely to be more contentious than coastal development. But along the state’s 2,000-mile shoreline the effects would be acute, particularly in San Mateo and Orange counties, where more than 100,000 people would be affected, according to the 99-page state-commissioned report by the Oakland-based Pacific Institute.
Detailed maps of the coastline, published on the institute’s website, show that residential neighborhoods in Venice and Marina Del Rey could find themselves in a flood zone. Water could cover airports in San Francisco and Oakland, parts of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, and large swaths of Huntington Beach and Newport Beach.
Interesting2: Seventeen of the world’s most active volcanoes have been supplied with monitoring equipment from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden to measure their emission of sulphur dioxide. The measurement results will be used to make it easier to predict volcano eruptions, and they can also be used to improve today’s climate models.
One of the Chalmers researchers who developed the monitoring equipment is Mattias Johansson, who recently defended his doctoral dissertation in the subject. The most active volcanoes in the world have special observatories that monitor them in order to be able to sound the alarm and evacuate people in the vicinity if an eruption threatens.
These observatories keep track of several parameters, primarily seismic activity. Now 17 observatories have received a new parameter that facilitates their work – the volcanoes’ emissions of sulphur dioxide. “Increasing gas emissions may indicate that magma is rising inside the volcano,” says Mattias Johansson at the Department of Radio and Space Science at Chalmers.
“If this information is added to the other parameters, better risk estimates can be made at the observatories.” The equipment he has been working with measures the total amount of gas emitted, whereas most other methods for metering gas can only indicate the gas concentration at a particular point. This is made possible by placing two or more metering instruments in different places around the volcano and then aggregating the information they gather.
Interesting3: Anthropogenic, or human generated, sounds have the potential to significantly affect the lives of aquatic animals – from the individual animal’s well-being, right through to its reproduction, migration and even survival of the species. According to a new study marine animals could suffer detrimental effects ranging from a loss of hearing to increased stressed levels as a result of environmental noise – in ways not dissimilar to humans and land animals.
The study also describes some recent well-controlled experimental studies while highlighting areas for future study. "Human generated sounds in the marine environment may result in only small shifts in behavior for some animals, but immediate death in others. With the vast increase in production of sound in the marine environment due to human activity such as oil exploration, shipping and construction, the effect of human-generated sounds on the aquatic life becomes a growing issue", said Dr. Arthur Popper from the University of Maryland, USA.
Marine animals use sounds to communicate and to glean information about their environment. Unlike the "visual scene" developed by the animal’s sense of sight, the "auditory scene" derived from sounds provides marine animals with a three dimensional view of the world and extends far beyond the visual scene.
Interesting4: Microbiologists tested 14 hand-hygiene agents — everything from soap and alcohol rubs to plain old tap water — against hardy bacteria and viruses applied to the hands of 62 volunteers. The study found that soap and water did the best job of removing germs. Just 10 seconds of washing soap and water was enough to knock off more than 90 percent of microbes. Nothing works better at getting rid of disease-causing viruses than simply washing one’s hands with old-fashioned soap and water.
That advice comes from the largest and most comprehensive scientific study ever done to compare the effectiveness of hand hygiene products. The study showed that after a short exposure time of 10 seconds, nearly all the hand hygiene products reduced 90 percent of bacteria on the hands. But waterless alcohol-based hand wipes only removed about 50 percent of bacteria from the subjects’ hands.
Interesting5: Tiny, ubiquitous particles in the atmosphere may play a profound role in regulating global climate. But the scientists who study these particles — called aerosols — have long struggled to accurately measure their composition, size, and global distribution. A new detection technique and a new satellite instrument developed by NASA scientists, the Aerosol Polarimetry Sensor (APS), should help ease the struggle.
Some types of small aerosols — such as black carbon from motor vehicle exhaust and biomass burning — promote atmospheric warming by absorbing sunlight. Others, such as sulfates from coal-fired power plants, exert a cooling effect by reflecting incoming solar radiation back into space. Overall, aerosols present one of the greatest areas of uncertainty in understanding what drives climate change.
But quantifying the influence of aerosols on the atmosphere and climate has been hampered by difficulties in measuring the aerosols themselves. The problem is especially acute over land, where the glare from sunlight reflecting off Earth’s surface overwhelms the passive imaging instruments scientists typically use to detect aerosols.
In recent years, however, researchers from NASA Goddard’s Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City have developed new remote-sensing techniques to more accurately measure aerosols over land.
Interesting6: Several well-known universities are organizing the ISCCC to address outstanding issues leading up to the UN-sponsored climate summit, including the likely costs of inaction, and the threat to global security and world poverty posed by dramatic climate change. The real concern now being voiced by the majority of climate scientists is that the UN IPCC Fourth Assessment Report is already out-of-date. Recent studies suggest that the pace of climate disruption has quickened, so that we may already be too late to stop changes that scientists warned of just five years ago.
In fact, the most recent IPCC report failed to adequately account for several climatic tipping points ? like methane released from a thawing tundra, and decreased albedo from a melting arctic ? which are happening earlier than predicted. The concern now is that climate change could accelerate so quickly that humanity will unable to slow the outcome.
The conference will synthesize the latest climate change science and publish a master document for negotiators heading to Copenhagen in December. Katherine Richardson, a marine biologist at the University of Copenhagen, said the synthesis would make direct calls on policy-makers to respond. "This is not a regular scientific conference," she says.
"This is a deliberate attempt to influence policy." Dr. Richardson’s quote could become fodder for the Rush Limbaughs of the world, who contend that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by climatologists greedy for research funding, but I’m impressed that a scientist would lay it on the line in such vivid and concrete terms.
Interesting7: You might never have to fear for your car’s paintwork again if a new kind of polyurethane that is able to heal its own surface scratches makes it to market. Small scratches to the surface of the material close up in only a few minutes when the material is exposed to the ultraviolet light in sunlight.
This life-like healing occurs because the damaged polymer molecules around the edges of a scratch use the energy from the UV to form new cross-links and recreate the network that makes up the material. The material could make a good top coat for an automobile, says Marek Urban, a polymer scientist at the University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, who led the study.
Previous self-healing materials have mostly used some form of liquid epoxy that is encapsulated in spheres or fibres, or delivered by an engineered vascular system. When the material is damaged, the epoxy is released into the fissure and sets when it contacts a hardening agent in the material.
Taking a different approach with their new self-healing polymer, Urban and his team combined polyurethane with a molecule made up of chitosan, a carbohydrate found in the shells of crustaceans like crabs and lobsters. The researchers modified the chitosan slightly with the addition of the structures composed of four carbon atoms called oxetane rings.
It is the oxetane rings that give the material its ability to heal, says Urban. When a scratch is made, some of the rings are broken, leaving chemically reactive free ends. However, while he has worked out which bonds are involved in the reaction, the exact details of the chemical process are so far unknown. Exposure to UV light creates reactive spots on sections of the chitosan molecules which then combine with the broken oxetane rings to form new chemical cross links that close up the damage.
The process appears to begin at the bottom of a scratch, pulling it closed like a zipper. Urban says that scratches about 10 micrometers wide and 50 deep – just visible with the naked eye – heal over after 30 minutes of exposure to UV light. The fact the process starts at the bottom the two sides of a scratch are closest together suggests it will work for larger scratches, too, he adds.
Interesting8: Human society is already, in small but significant ways, being shaped by global warming. So, said a climatologist at the climate change congress in Copenhagen, Denmark, on Thursday. Jean Palutikof of the University of East Anglia, UK, pointed to numerous studies warning that climate change is going to deeply transform our society, by increasing the death rate, for example, or changing the way we grow food.
If you look in the right places, says Palutikof, it is already possible to see our behavior changing. Models and observations tell us which parts of the planet are most likely to feel the heat of climate change – so these "hotspots" are a good place to start looking for such changes. Palutikof focused on two locations: the maize fields of the US Midwest, and south-east Australia.
Quoting figures from the published literature, Palutikof showed that over the past few decades, the US Midwest has gradually become warmer. At the same time, agricultural surveys show that farmers have been putting their first maize seed in the ground earlier and earlier in the year.While Palutikof can not rule out that this apparent adaptation is a coincidence, she points out that it would make little sense for farmers to plant seeds earlier in the year if there were no advantage to it.
Interesting9: If Friday the 13th is unlucky, then 2009 is an unusually unlucky year. This week’s Friday the 13th is one of three to endure this year. The first came last month. The next is in November. Such a rare triple-threat occurs only once every 11 years.
The origin of the link between bad luck and Friday the 13th is murky. The whole thing might date to Biblical times (the 13th guest at the Last Supper betrayed Jesus). By the Middle Ages, both Friday and 13 were considered bearers of bad fortune. In modern times, the superstition permeates society.
Here are five of our favorite Friday-the-13th facts:
1. Fear of Friday the 13th — one of the most popular myths in science — is called paraskavedekatriaphobia as well as friggatriskaidekaphobia. Triskaidekaphobia is fear of the number 13.
2. Many hospitals have no room 13, while some tall buildings skip the 13th floor and some airline terminals omit Gate 13.
3. President Franklin D. Roosevelt would not travel on the 13th day of any month and would never host 13 guests at a meal. Napoleon and President Herbert Hoover were also triskaidekaphobic, with an abnormal fear of the number 13.
4. Mark Twain once was the 13th guest at a dinner party. A friend warned him not to go. "It was bad luck," Twain later told the friend. "They only had food for 12." Superstitious diners in Paris can hire a quatorzieme, or professional 14th guest.
5. The number 13 suffers from its position after 12, according to numerologists who consider the latter to be a complete number — 12 months in a year, 12 signs of the zodiac, 12 gods of Olympus, 12 labors of Hercules, 12 tribes of Israel, 12 apostles of Jesus, 12 days of Christmas and 12 eggs in a dozen.
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