March 16-17, 2009
Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Monday afternoon:
Lihue, Kauai – 75
Honolulu, Oahu – 77
Kaneohe, Oahu – 78
Kahului, Maui – 79
Hilo, Hawaii – 73
Kailua-kona – 80
Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level – and on the highest mountains…at 4 p.m. Monday afternoon:
Kailua-kona – 79F
Lihue, Kauai – 71
Haleakala Crater – missing (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 27 (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 Monday afternoon:
0.30 Kalaheo, Kauai
0.30 H-1 Kapiolani, Oahu
0.01 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.00 Kahoolawe
0.01 West Wailuaiki, Maui
0.57 Pali 2, Big Island
Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a low pressure system located to the northeast of the islands, and moving away. This low has left a light wind producing trough over the islands. Our winds will be light and variable Tuesday, then strengthening trade winds will arrive later Wednesday or Thursday.
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
Nice sky reflection…on the Big Island
Photo Credit: flickr.com
Light and variable winds will hold firm through mid-week, with trade winds rushing in by Thursday…continuing through the end of the week. A low pressure center has opening up into a broad trough of low pressure, oriented southwest through northeast of the islands. Here’s a weather map so you can see this low pressure system Monday evening. Conditions have definitely become less windy now. The NWS is keeping a wind advisory up for the gusty winds atop the Haleakala Crater on Maui…and a high wind warning for the tall mountains on the Big Island.
A new shower area will push into the state Tuesday into Wednesday…with the expected heaviest amounts over the Big Island, and maybe Maui. A trough of low pressure, what’s left of the recent low pressure centers, will keep our air mass shower prone for a few more days. The culprit for this new batch of showers will be a deep upper level disturbance…coming in from the southwest direction. This upper air feature will lead to a new round of localized showers, some that will likely become quite heavy. The NWS has issued a flash flood watch for the Big Island, starting Tuesday morning, and continuing into the evening. As the trade winds return after mid-week, the emphasis for showers will migrate back over to the windward coasts and slopes.
We’ve shifted into a convective weather pattern now…before ending up with the trade winds after mid-week. We’re certainly not done with cloudy skies yet, as a new area of multi-canopied clouds arrives Monday night into Tuesday, poised to bring new showers into our area during the next couple of days…especially over and around the Big Island, and perhaps Maui. Here’s a satellite image, showing these clouds looming to the west and southwest of our islands. I’ll keep this looping radar image, around for rains that should start showing up by Tuesday morning. These showers will back off by Thursday, with a fairly normal trade wind weather pattern actualizing then.
It’s early Monday evening here in Kihie, Maui, as I begin writing this last part of today’s narrative. We seen a rapid change, between yesterday and today, in terms of what the computer models have been advertising. There was an initial prospect of light winds, with afternoon convective showers, which may still happen. The new twist however shows more organized showers and rain taking aim on the Big Island. As you might have read in one of the paragraphs above, the NWS forecast office in Honolulu has issued a flash flood watch for that southern most island in the chain. The fact that Maui is practically right next store, gives it a chance to have some serious precipitation as well. The rest of the state may see some showers, maybe even some generous ones, during the afternoon hours, and especially over the mountains through Wednesday.
Looking out the window here in Kihei, I see just a few lower level clouds, but a pretty good amount of high cirrus moving overhead. This will present the good chance for really nice sunset colors. Depending upon how thick the clouds are by Tuesday morning, we may or may not be in store for another colorful sunrise then. I’m ready to take the drive back upcountry, to Kula now. I’ll have a better chance to check out the weather on the way, so if anything catches my eye on the way home, I’ll come back online and share that with you. Otherwise, I’ll be back early Tuesday morning with your next new weather narrative from paradise. I know I shouldn’t let you know this, but I’m starting to get a little bit excited with the prospect of this next inclement weather event. By the way, I definitely expect more snow to fall over the summit of Mauna Kea on the Big Island, over the next couple of days, so I’ve add that link…so we can keep an eye on that near 14,000 peak. I hope you have a great Monday night, and that you will join me here again on Tuesday! Aloha for now…Glenn.
Interesting: Women nowadays are three times more likely than those born a century ago to do what men have done for millennia — follow their father’s footsteps into his line of work, a newly announced study finds. One way or another, fathers and daughters have been paying more attention to each other, and daughters picked up job cues or assistance from dads, as more and more women entered the labor force, the research suggests.
Just under 6 percent of women born from 1909 to 1915 worked in their father’s occupation, while around 20 percent of women born in the mid-1970s do so (they are in their early 30s now), the researchers found. Some of this increase is just a result of women’s increased participation in the work force — women’s labor force participation has tripled in the past century.
However, economists Melinda Morrill of North Carolina State University and Judith Hellerstein of the University of Maryland, College Park, also were able to statistically pull out the impact of dad’s work on a daughter’s career choice.
They found that a significant amount of the probability that a woman will follow in her father’s occupational footsteps can be attributed just to the increased transmission of "occupation-specific human capital" between fathers and daughters. (They didn’t focus on mothers’ impact on daughters’ career choice because for many of the older women in their sample, their mothers were not in the labor force, though that could be a factor in the future.)
Human capital just refers to skills and experiences that help someone career-wise. Here are some of the possible ways a dad could pass this to his daughter, Hellerstein and Morrill say: teaching a daughter his trade; paying for his daughter to be trained in his trade; spending more time with his daughter and thereby showing the value of working in his field; making referrals to help his daughter get a job or training for a job; giving a daughter a job at his office or company to see if she likes it.
What about dads and sons? No similar increase over time was found in the percentage of sons pursuing careers in the same field as their fathers. That’s because men’s tendency to work has been steady over time and, presumably, the typical father-son relationship hasn’t changed much in this respect.
Interesting2: Without their distinctive livery, lots of little reef fish would look much the same. Color differentiates them, not shape. The blue-striped fangblenny, found in coral reefs in Indonesia and Australia, is different. What marks it out from every other fish known to man is that it can change color at will. The default color is brown, but the fangblenny can switch to yellow or a range of other bright hues to deceive other fish.
"Their repertoire of disguises appears to prevent or reduce detection by potential victims," says Queensland University marine biologist Karen Cheney. "They may also escape from predators by hiding in a large shoal."Cheney’s work, published in The Proceedings of the Royal Society, is important because the fangblenny is one of a kind in the fish world. Lizards use the same technique to hunt or hide, but the fangblenny is the only fish so far found to have that ability.
Without the skills of a chameleon, the fangblenny would be hard pressed to live as it does. It nibbles the dead scales of larger reef fish – a diet made possible by deceiving other fish into thinking that’s not what it’s about. A particularly clever trick is morphing into the colors of a juvenile cleaner wrasse. The wrasse lives a charmed life. It helps larger fish avoid potentially deadly infestations by nipping off the parasites that cling to them. In return for this service, it is left alone by much bigger fish.
Interesting3: Leatherback turtles, the most widely distributed reptiles on Earth, are threatened with extinction themselves, in large part due to the carelessness of humans. A Dalhousie University professor addresses the threat of plastics to this endangered species. They survived the extinction of the dinosaurs. They’re descendants of one of the oldest family trees in history, spanning 100 million years.
But today leatherback turtles, the most widely distributed reptiles on Earth, are threatened with extinction themselves, in large part due to the carelessness of humans. We’ve seen reference to the dangers plastic poses to marine life, garbage that we humans directly and indirectly deposit in the oceans, but how clearly have we received the message? Not well enough according to a recent article in the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin co-authored by Dalhousie University’s Mike James.
“We wanted to see if plastics ingestion in leatherbacks was hype or reality,” says Dr. James, senior species at risk biologist for Fisheries and Oceans Canada and adjunct professor with Dalhousie’s Department of Biology. “It was a monumental effort that looked back at necropsies over the last century from all over the world,” he explains. (Necropsies are post-mortem examinations performed on animals.)
“After reviewing the results of 371 necropsies since 1968, we discovered over one third of the turtles had ingested plastic.” Since leatherbacks prefer eating jellyfish, it’s widely believed they mistake bags or other plastics for their meals. Since jellyfish and marine debris concentrate where ocean water masses meet, leatherbacks feeding in these areas are vulnerable to ingesting plastic.
Once leatherbacks ingest plastic, thousands of spines lining the throat and esophagus make it nearly impossible to regurgitate. The plastic can lead to partial or even complete obstruction of the gastrointestinal tract, resulting in decreased digestive efficiency, energetic and reproductive costs and, for some, starvation. “Plastics ingestion doesn’t always cause death, but there are clearly health risks to the turtles,” says Dr. James. Fascinated by reptiles as a child, Dr. James developed a lifelong interest in turtles, from raising them as a kid, to his PhD research and now as a biologist and conservationist. He says there are simple ways to stop these ongoing threats.
“The frustrating, yet hopeful aspect is that humans can easily begin addressing the solution, without major lifestyle changes,” says Dr. James. “It’s as simple as reducing packaging and moving towards alternative, biodegradable materials and recycling.” Leatherback turtles are classified as critically endangered world-wide. The true population size is not precisely known, as only adult females come ashore for nesting in remote tropical locations. During the summer and fall, Canadian waters support the highest density of foraging leatherbacks in the North Atlantic.
Interesting4: A herd of young birdlike dinosaurs met their death on the muddy margins of a lake some 90 million years ago, according to a team of Chinese and American paleontologists that excavated the site in the Gobi Desert in western Inner Mongolia. The Sudden sudden death of the herd in a mud trap provides a rare snapshot of social behavior. Composed entirely of juveniles of a single species of ornithomimid dinosaur (Sinornithomimus dongi), the herd suggests that immature individuals were left to fend for themselves when adults were preoccupied with nesting or brooding.
"There were no adults or hatchlings," said Paul Sereno, professor at the University of Chicago and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence. "These youngsters were roaming around on their own," remarked Tan Lin, from the Department of Land and Resources of Inner Mongolia. Within an exquisite pair of the skeletons, prepared for display in Sereno’s lab and airlifted back to China in late February, preserve stomach stones and the animal’s’ last meals are preserved.
Sereno, Tan and Zhao Xijin, professor in the Chinese Academy of Sciences, led the 2001 expedition that found the fossils. Team members also included David Varricchio of Montana State University (MSU), Jeffrey Wilson of the University of Michigan and Gabrielle Lyon of Project Exploration. "Finding a mired herd is exceedingly rare among living animals," said Varricchio, an assistant professor of paleontology at MSU. "The best examples are from hoofed mammals," such as water buffalo in Australia or feral horses in the American West, he said.
The first bones from the dinosaur herd were spotted by a Chinese geologist in 1978 at the base of a small hill in a desolate, windswept region of the Gobi Desert. Some 20 years later, a Sino-Japanese team excavated the first skeletons, naming the dinosaur Sinornithomimus ("Chinese bird mimic").
Interesting5: Someone in the developing world – particularly in rural Africa – dies from a rabid dog bite every 10 minutes. But global elimination of this horrific disease appears to be possible, according to a team which includes scientists from McMaster University, Britain and the United States. In a paper in the current issue of PLoS Biology, they report their analysis of data on rabies transmission in two districts of rural Tanzania (Serengeti and Ngorongoro) and suggest that with "sustained, international commitment, global elimination of rabies from domestic dog populations, the most dangerous vector to humans, is a realistic goal."
Jonathan Dushoff, an assistant professor of biology at McMaster University, and a member of the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research, analyzed the data. "The paper provides important evidence that the elimination of canine rabies may be possible." Rabies is an acute viral encephalitis that is spread through the saliva of infected animals.
Human rabies deaths from domestic dogs are rare in North America, but the disease causes over 24,000 deaths a year in Africa, mostly in poor rural communities and, most often, in children. Globally, 55,000 people die annually from canine rabies.
During a rabies outbreak in northern Tanzania, the team of scientists was able to directly trace case-to-case transmission of rabies. From this data, they generated a detailed analysis of rabies transmission biology and found evidence for surprisingly low levels of transmission. The scientists also analyzed outbreak data from around the world and found the transmission of canine rabies has been inherently low throughout its global historic range, explaining the success of control efforts in developed countries.
Interesting6: National Research Council claims US agencies and political leaders not getting the right information or guidance. America is woefully unprepared for climate change, and the government agencies charged with delivering the latest science to decision makers are not up to the task, a new report said today. The National Research Council, a policy advice centre that is part of the US National Academy of Sciences, said that government agencies and political leaders, concerned more than ever about climate change, were not getting the information or the guidance they needed.
"Many decision makers are experiencing or anticipating a new climate regime and are asking questions about climate change and potential responses to it that federal agencies are unprepared to answer," the council said in its report, Restructuring Federal Climate Research to Meet the Challenges of Climate Change. "Robust and effective responses to climate change demand a vastly improved body of scientific knowledge."
Interesting7: The northeastern U.S. coast is likely to see the world’s biggest sea level rise from man-made global warming, a new study predicts. However much the oceans rise by the end of the century, add an extra 8 inches or so for New York, Boston and other spots along the coast from the mid-Atlantic to New England. That’s because of predicted changes in ocean currents, according to a study based on computer models published online Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience.
An extra 8 inches – on top of a possible 2 or 3 feet of sea rise globally by 2100 – is a big deal, especially when nor’easters and hurricanes hit, experts said. "It’s not just waterfront homes and wetlands that are at stake here," said Donald Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, who wasn’t part of the study. "Those kinds of rises in sea level when placed on top of the storm surges we see today, put in jeopardy lots of infrastructure, including the New York subway system."
For years, scientists have talked about rising sea levels due to global warming – both from warm water expanding and the melt of ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica. Predictions for the average worldwide sea rise keep changing along with the rate of ice melt. Recently, more scientists are saying the situation has worsened so that a 3-foot rise in sea level by 2100 is becoming a common theme.
Interesting8: People with companion animals are like people with companion humans: happier, healthier and longer-lived, says Melbourne researcher Tim Rogers. While the standard logic is that pet owners get out more, and so are fitter because they take more exercise, Rogers says it has more to do with the quality of the outing than simply the cardiovascular benefits of being at one end of a leash.
"Most researchers are now converging on the idea that it’s the sense of emotional closeness and support that pets provide that is behind their stress-busting power," he said. "It now appears that animal companions benefit our lives in much the same way as do human companions."
Simone Maher, a veterinarian with animal welfare group Royal Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), also has evidence that dogs can indeed be our best friends. Recent RSPCA research in Australia found that more than a third of people would sooner dump their partner than their pet.
"An astounding 86.8 per cent said they would choose their pet over their friends or flat-mate," Maher said. Only one third of 200 respondents to the survey said their partner understood them better than their pet did. "In fact, almost a quarter of respondents wished their partner was like their pet," she said.
Interesting9: The International Space Station may be moved on Monday to avoid a possible collision with a piece of debris from a Russian satellite, NASA says. The danger comes just days after space station crew members took refuge in a docked Soyuz spacecraft due to the close pass of another piece of space junk.
Tracking data suggests the debris is a 10-centimetre portion of Russia’s Cosmos 1275, a military navigation satellite that was launched in 1981, says Gene Stansbery, NASA’s orbital debris program manager. Pieces of the satellite, which broke up not long after reaching orbit, have progressively lost altitude due to the drag of Earth’s atmosphere, so that they now come within the space station’s altitude, Stansbery says.
The Cosmos 1275 chunk will make its closest approach to the station at 0314 EDT (0714 GMT) on Tuesday. If there is a greater than 0.01% chance that debris will come within an imaginary box around the station that measures 25 by 25 by 0.75 km (with the 0.75 km being altitude), the space station will likely be moved to avoid it, says NASA spokesperson Kylie Clem.
The debris from Cosmos 1275 may pass within 0.8 kilometers of the station, according to US Strategic Command, a Department of Defense program that tracks orbital debris spanning at least 10 centimeters across and routinely calculates the risk of collisions with the space station. That is far closer than last week’s event, when a 13-centimetre-wide piece of debris from a spent satellite motor was predicted to come within about 4.5 km of the station.
But the probability of the debris making such a close approach is still unclear, because it is difficult to determine the exact orbits of space debris. If a maneuver is deemed necessary, the engines aboard the docked Soyuz capsule will be used to move the station to a lower altitude, beginning at 2154 EDT on Monday.
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