Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs / March 17-18, 2009

March 17-18, 2009 


Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Tuesday afternoon: 

Lihue, Kauai – 75
Honolulu, Oahu – 77
Kaneohe, Oahu – 76
Kahului, Maui – 78
Hilo, Hawaii – 75
Kailua-kona – 77

Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level – and on the highest mountains…at 4 p.m. Tuesday afternoon:

Port Allen, Kauai – 79F
Princeville, Kauai – 72

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 Tuesday evening:

0.89 Hanalei River, Kauai
0.03 Kahuku Training Area, Oahu
0.00 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.01 Kahoolawe
1.08 Kahakuloa, Maui
0.45 Kapapala Ranch, Big Island

Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a departing low pressure system located to the northeast of the islands, moving away. Meanwhile, we see high pressure systems to the NNW and NE of the islands. Our winds will become light trade winds Wednesday…becoming better established 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

  Really nice north shore geography…Kauai
   Photo Credit: Google.com

Light and variable winds will give way to strengthening trade winds later Wednesday or on Thursday.  A low pressure center, now to the northeast of our islands continues moving away, but has left a trough of low pressure in its wake. This trough is keeping the trade winds at bay for the moment. As the trade winds fill back into our Hawaiian Island weather picture during the next 12-24 hours, they will become well established into the weekend.

An upper level trough of low pressure will be moving across our area tonight…bringing showers, especially over Maui County, and to some lesser extent the Big island. This upper air feature has lead to a new round of localized showers, some of which that have been quite heavy. The NWS has kept a flash flood watch active for both the Big Island and Maui Tuesday night, continuing into early Wednesday morning. As the trade winds return later Wednesday, the emphasis for showers will migrate back over to the windward coasts and slopes then into Thursday. 

A canopy of high clouds limited our sunshine Tuesday, I might add…greatly. Here’s a satellite image, showing those clouds, with only very limited thin spots at the time of this writing. Meanwhile. the lower level clouds, and their associated showers, have for the most part taken aim on the islands of Maui County, to some extend the Big Island. This looping radar image will help us to keep an eye on that precipitation. These showers will back off during the day Wednesday, with a fairly normal trade wind weather pattern returning Thursday into the weekend.

It’s early Tuesday evening here in Kihei, Maui, as I begin writing this last part of today’s narrative.  What a day, as totally cloudy skies blanketed the entire state of Hawaii…what else is new! There were some good showers falling too, which as we started the day, looked they would impact the Big Island most readily. The computer models were pointing this out too, although as it turned out…Maui got the most rainfall. There was no official reports of thunderstorms that I saw, but there were some red radar echos, indicating heavy rains, out along the Hana coast of east Maui, during the afternoon hours. The NWS office issued a flood advisory for that area, but has since cancelled it. My neighbors up in Kula emailed, and told me that it was really coming down up there too.

I feel a little miffed, as I spent the day in an office, a bit detached from all the weather that was occurring out the window! It showered lightly late in the afternoon here in Kihei, but nothing heavy by any means. Looking out the window before I leave for the drive back upcountry, it’s still lightly raining out there. I’ll be using my wind shield wipers all the way home, which will at least present some fun. When I get home I’ll put on my rain jacket, and get outside for my customary walk, unless that is, it’s pouring like crazy. If I run into some really hectic weather conditons, on the way home, I’ll come back online and tell you about it. Otherwise, I’ll catch up with you early Wednesday morning, when I’ll have your brand new weather narrative waiting here for you then. I hope you have a great Tuesday night wherever you happen to be hanging your hat! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! – Once, while on vacation in Rome, I noticed a marble column in St. Peter’s with a golden telephone on it. As a young priest passed by, I  asked who the telephone was for. The priest told me it was a direct line to heaven, and if I’d like to call, it would be a thousand dollars. I was amazed, but declined the offer.

Throughout Italy, I kept seeing the same golden telephone on a
marble column. At each, I asked about it and the answer was always the same: It was a direct line to heaven and I could call for a thousand dollars.

Then I finished my tour in Ireland .. I decided to attend Mass at a local village church. When I walked in the door I noticed the golden telephone. Underneath it there was a sign stating: "DIRECT LINE TO HEAVEN: 25 cents." "Father," I said, "I have been all over Italy and in all the cathedrals I visited, I’ve seen telephones exactly like this one. But the price is always a thousand dollars. Why is it that this one is only 25 cents?"

The priest smiled and said, "Darlin’, you’re in Ireland now. It’s
a local call." 

~~~ A friend of my mine named Sharon, from the Santa Cruz, California area, sent this to me this morning…seemed fitting.

Interesting: Ancient garbage can be like gold to archaeologists. During excavation of an 800-year-old trash dump in Lyon, France, scientists discovered the archaeological equivalent of golden shoe soles: A trove of leather soles of shoes, which is helping scientists understand how leather stays preserved in wet, oxygen-free environments. That knowledge could aid restoration of other leather artifacts, according to a report on analysis of the old soles scheduled for the current issue of ACS’ semi-monthly journal Analytical Chemistry.

In the article, Michel Bardet and colleagues point out that leather consists of collagen, a tough protein that can remain intact hundreds of thousands of years under ideal conditions. The French soles were buried in mud in the absence of oxygen — good conditions for preservation. They used laboratory technology called nuclear magnetic resonance to compare composition of the ancient leather to modern leather. It turned out that tannin, which helps to preserve leather, had been washed out of the old soles and replaced by iron oxides. The iron oxides, which leached into the leather from surrounding soil, helped preserve the soles in the absence of tannins.

Interesting2:  Scientists have long established that the Antarctic Peninsula is one of the most rapidly warming spots on Earth. Now, new research using detailed satellite data indicates that the changing climate is affecting not just the penguins at the apex of the food chain, but simultaneously the microscopic life that is the base of the ecosystem. The research was published in the journal Science by researchers with the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) LTER (Long Term Ecological Research) program.

The LTER, which has 26 sites around the globe, including two in Antarctica, enables tracking of ecological variables over time, so that the mechanisms of climate change impact on ecosystems can be revealed. The specific findings were made by researchers with the Palmer LTER, using data collected near Palmer Station and from the research vessel Laurence M. Gould. Both Palmer Station and the Laurence M. Gould are operated by NSF’s Office of Polar Programs.

Hugh Ducklow, of the Marie Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, the principal investigator for the Palmer LTER project, said that the new findings are scientifically significant, but they also are consistent with the climate trends on the Peninsula and other observed changes. However, it took new scientific tools and analytical work by post-doctoral fellow Martin Montes Hugo to verify scientifically what scientists had been inferring from other changes for some time.

"I have to say the findings weren’t a surprise; I think with the weight of all the other observations that we had on changes happening to organisms higher up in the food chain, we thought that phytoplankton weren’t going to escape this level of climate change," Ducklow said. "But it took Martin to have all the right tools and the abilities to go in and do the analysis and prove what we suspected."

Interesting3:  Massive predators like Albertosaurus and Tyrannosaurus rex may have been at the top of the food chain, but they were not the only meat-eating dinosaurs to roam North America, according to Canadian researchers who have discovered the smallest dinosaur species on the continent to date. Their work is also helping re-draw the picture of North America’s ecosystem at the height of the dinosaur age 75 million years ago. "Hesperonychus is currently the smallest dinosaur known from North America. But its discovery just emphasizes how little we actually know, and it raises the possibility that there are even smaller ones out there waiting to be found," said Nick Longrich, a paleontology research associate in the University of Calgary’s Department of Biological Sciences.

"Small carnivorous dinosaurs seemed to be completely absent from the environment, which seemed bizarre because today the small carnivores outnumber the big ones," he said. "It turns out that they were here and they played a more important role in the ecosystem than we realized. So for the past 100 years, we’ve completely overlooked a major part of North America’s dinosaur community."

In a paper published March 16 in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Longrich and University of Alberta paleontologist Philip Currie describe a new genus of carnivorous dinosaur that was smaller than a modern housecat and likely hunted insects, small mammals and other prey through the swamps and forests of the late Cretaceous period in southeastern Alberta, Canada.

Weighing approximately two kilograms and standing about 50 centimeter tall, Hesperonychus elizabethae resembled a miniature version of the famous bipedal predator Velociraptor, to which it was closely related. Hesperonychus ran about on two legs and had razor-like claws and an enlarged sickle-shaped claw on its second toe. It had a slender build and slender head with dagger-like teeth.

"It was half the size of a domestic cat and probably hunted and ate whatever it could for its size – insects, mammals, amphibians and maybe even baby dinosaurs," Longrich said. "It probably spent most of its time close to the ground searching through the marshes and forests that characterized the area at the end of the Cretaceous."

Interesting4:  A new image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope offers a rare view of an imminent collision between the cores of two merging galaxies, each powered by a black hole with millions of times the mass of the sun. The galactic cores are in a single, tangled galaxy called NGC 6240, located 400-million light years away in the constellation Ophiuchus. Millions of years ago, each core was the dense center of its own galaxy before the two galaxies collided and ripped each other apart. Now, these cores are approaching each other at tremendous speeds and preparing for the final cataclysmic collision. They will crash into each other in a few million years, a relatively short period on a galactic timescale.

The spectacular image combines visible light from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and infrared light from Spitzer. It catches the two galaxies during a rare, short-lived phase of their evolution, when both cores of the interacting galaxies are still visible but closing in on each other fast. "One of the most exciting things about the image is that this object is unique," said Stephanie Bush of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass., lead author of a new paper describing the observation in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal. "Merging is a quick process, especially when you get to the train wreck that is happening. There just aren’t many galactic mergers at this stage in the nearby universe."

Interesting5:  A new Queen’s University study shows that detergents used to clean up spills of diesel oil actually increase its toxicity to fish, making it more harmful. "The detergents may be the best way to treat spills in the long term because the dispersed oil is diluted and degraded," says Biology professor Peter Hodson. "But in the short term, they increase the bioavailability and toxicity of the fuel to rainbow trout by 100-fold."

The detergents are oil dispersants that decrease the surface tension between oil and water, allowing floating oil to mix with water as tiny droplets. Dr. Hodson and his team found that dispersion reduces the potential impacts of oil on surface-dwelling animals, while this should enhance biodegradation, it also creates a larger reservoir of oil in the water column.

This increases the transfer of hydrocarbons from oil to water, Dr. Hodson explains. The hydrocarbons pass easily from water into tissues and are deadly to fish in the early stages of life. "This could seriously impair the health of fish populations, resulting in long-term reductions in economic returns to fisheries," he says. The study is published in the journal, Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry.

The researchers also determined that even though chemical dispersants are not typically used in freshwater, turbulent rivers can disperse spilled diesel and create similar negative effects. "It doesn’t matter if the oil is being dispersed by chemicals or by the current," says Dr. Hodson. "Now that we know how deadly dispersed oil is, it is important to assess the risks of diesel spills to fish and fisheries in terms of the spill location, and the timing relative to fish spawning and development."

Interesting6:  For every gram of salt that Americans reduce in their diets daily, a quarter of a million fewer new heart disease cases and over 200,000 fewer deaths would occur over a decade, researchers said at the American Heart Association’s 49th Annual Conference on Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Prevention. These results were derived from a validated computer-simulation of heart disease among U.S. adults.

“A very modest decrease in the amount of salt — hardly detectable in the taste of food — can have dramatic health benefits for the U.S.,” said Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, Ph.D., M.D., M.A.S., lead author of the study and an assistant professor of Medicine and of Epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco.

“It was a surprise to see the magnitude of the impact on the population, given the very small reductions in salt that we were modeling.” A 3-gram–a-day reduction in salt intake (about 1200 mg of sodium) would result in 6 percent fewer cases of new heart disease, 8 percent fewer heart attacks, and 3 percent fewer deaths. Even larger health benefits are projected for African Americans, who are more likely to have high blood pressure and whose blood pressure may be more sensitive to salt.

Among African Americans, new heart disease cases would be reduced by 10 percent, heart attacks by 13 percent and deaths by 6 percent. For years, ample evidence has linked salt intake to high blood pressure and heart disease. Yet, salt consumption among Americans has risen by 50 percent and blood pressure has risen by nearly the same amount since the 1970s, according to researchers.

Interesting7:  How do the many carnivorous animals of the Americas avoid competing for the same lunch, or becoming each other’s meal? A possible answer comes from a new study by a pair of researchers at the University of California, Davis. Their large-scale analysis shows that it’s not just chance that’s at play, but avoidance strategies themselves that have been a driving force in the evolution of many carnivores, influencing such factors as whether species are active daytime or nighttime, whether they inhabit forests or grasslands, or live in trees or on the ground. The Americas are home to more than 80 species of terrestrial carnivores, including cats, dogs, bears, weasels, skunks and raccoons. Commonly, 20 or more species can occupy the same region.

"For the most part, these overlapping species all share the same prey base — other animals — which includes each other," said Jennifer Hunter, who conducted the study for her Ph.D. dissertation in ecology. Hunter and co-author Tim Caro, professor of wildlife, fish and conservation biology, first plotted the known ranges of all of the American carnivores on one big digital map.

Assuming that wherever ranges overlapped, competition and predation between those species was possible, they then compared those animals’ behavioral characteristics, body sizes and coloration. By analyzing this huge matrix of information, they were able to tease out broad patterns of strategies employed by each family.

Interesting8:  Fossil remains of a huge and fearsome marine predator, dubbed "Predator X", have been discovered in Svalbard, a remote Arctic archipelago. About 15 meters long and weighing 45 tons, the creature is a new species of pliosaur, and ruled the Jurassic seas some 147 million years ago. Predator X had a head twice the size of Tyrannosaurus rex and its bite had four times the force, at around 33,000 pounds. Its teeth were each around 1 foot long. The remains were discovered in June 2008 during a two-week expedition led by Jørn Hurum of the Natural History Museum at the University of Oslo.

Its anatomy, physiology and hunting strategy all point to it being the ultimate predator – the most dangerous creature to patrol the Earth’s oceans," according to the museum. The key find enabling the dimensions of the beast to be calculated was a spherical bone called the bassioccipital condyle, which connected the base of the skull to the spine. "The condyle we found measures 15 centimeters in diameter, the largest of any known pliosaur species," explains Hurum. "By comparison, the condyle of T. Rex measures just 8 centimeters, meaning that Predator X’s skull was at least double the size," he says.

In all, the team found 20,000 fragments of the creature’s skeleton, which is being assembled at the museum. Analyses of bones from the four flippers suggest that the animal cruised using just two fore-flippers – using the back pair for extra speed when pursuing and capturing prey. Predator X’s brain was of a similar type and size, proportionally, to that of today’s great white shark, the team says. The full details of the find are to be published later this year, and a documentary following the expedition will be shown around the world from May.