March 18-19, 2009
Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Wednesday afternoon:
Lihue, Kauai – 76
Honolulu, Oahu – 84
Kaneohe, Oahu – 78
Kahului, Maui – 79
Hilo, Hawaii – 81
Kailua-kona – 84
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 – 82F
Princeville, Kauai – 73
Haleakala Crater – missing (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 28 (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:
1.27 Mount Waialaele, Kauai
2.65 Punaluu Pump, Oahu
0.02 Molokai
0.03 Lanai
0.34 Kahoolawe
1.56 West Wailuaiki, Maui
1.19 Piihonua, Big Island
Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing high pressure systems to the NNW and NE of the islands. Our winds will be 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
Sunset Hula Dancer
Photo Credit: Google.com
The trade winds returned to the Hawaiian Islands Wednesday…becoming fast paced already on the Big Island. As these trade winds continue to fill back into our Hawaiian Island weather picture Thursday, they will become even more well established going into the weekend. There are no marine advisories for either wind or waves, with none expected for the time being. The winds are still a bit gusty over the mountain summits on the Big Island, where a wind advisory is in effect. These winds are blowing between 25 and 35 mph Wednesday evening. Here’s a webcam picture of the top of Mauna Kea, on the Big Island. While we’re looking at mountain tops, here’s the webcam for the summit of the Haleakala Crater on Maui.
As the trade winds take back over here in the islands, our weather will improve, with more sunshine…soon but perhaps not quite yet. This clearing will be a little slower than expected, as yet another upper level trough of low pressure will be passing by just to the south of the islands. The instability brought about by this low pressure system, sparked some thunderstorms to our southwest during the day Wednesday. As you can see from this satellite image, there’s a fair amount of high clouds being carried over our islands, which are the tops of cumulonimbus clouds well offshore. Whatever showers that form in our vicinty, at least for the time being, could be enhanced by the cold air aloft…associated with this area of low pressure.
It’s early Wednesday evening here in Kihei, Maui, as I begin writing this last part of today’s narrative. As I was mentioning this morning, we’re moving through the very last days of winter 2009, as we prepare to slide across the starting line into the spring season. It looks very likely that when we greet the spring equinox, or what’s officially called the vernal equinox, we will have a fine trade wind weather pattern going on then. The time of this occurrence will be March 20th, at 1:44am here in the Hawaiian Islands. This makes early Friday morning the beginning of spring, so that we just have the rest of Wednesday night through Thursday to still experience the last few momdents of winter 2009.
Looking out the window here in Kihei, before I jump in the car, for the 40 or so minute drive home to Kula…I see lots of cirrus clouds. These clouds are clearly showing up in the satellite image just up the page. You can see this particular clump of clouds to the west and southwest of Hawaii…out over the ocean. Looking at this looping satellite image, I don’t really see any signs of incoming showers, although there are some falling over the sea outside of radar range. It will be interesting to see if we have any heavy showers forming over or around the islands tonight, or into the day Thursday…it wouldn’t overly surprise me. ~~~ These troughs of low pressure just keep forming out to the west and SW of us, with little prior warning. If we are to believe the computer models however, they suggest that by Friday, and into the weekend, that we would see less high clouds, and more sunshine. Working against the showers, will be the strengthening trade winds over the next couple of days. If they got a little stronger than they were today, they could limit the cloud growth vertically, and help eliminate the chance of heavier showers.
That’s it for Wednesday, I really have to run, or at least get home, so I can get out for my sunset walk. I hope that you have a great Wednesday night, and that you will stop by for another visit on Thursday! Aloha for now…Glenn.
Interesting: The Ancient Egyptians cherished their fragrant scents, too, as perfume flacons from this period indicate. In its permanent exhibition, Bonn University’s Egyptian Museum has a particularly well preserved example on display. Screening this 3,500-year-old flacon with a computer tomograph, scientists at the university detected the desiccated residues of a fluid, which they now want to submit to further analysis.
They might even succeed in reconstructing this scent. Pharaoh Hatshepsut was a power-conscious woman who assumed the reins of government in Egypt around the year 1479 B.C. In actual fact, she was only supposed to represent her step-son Thutmose III, who was three years old at the time, until he was old enough to take over. But the interregnum lasted 20 years.
"She systematically kept Thutmose out of power," says Michael Höveler-Müller, the curator of Bonn University’s Egyptian Museum. Hatshepsut’s perfume is also presumably a demonstration of her power. "We think it probable that one constituent was incense – the scent of the gods," Michael Höveler-Müller declares.
This idea is not so wide of the mark, as it is a known fact that in the course of her regency Haptshepsut undertook an expedition to Punt – the modern Eritrea, and the Egyptians had been importing precious goods such as ebony, ivory, gold, and just this incense, from there since the third millennium B.C. Apparently the expedition brought back whole incense plants, which Hatshepsut then had planted in the vicinity of her funerary temple.
The filigree flacon now under examination by the researchers in Bonn bears an inscription with the name of the Pharaoh. Hence it was probably once in her possession. The vessel is exceptionally well preserved. "So we considered it might be rewarding to have it screened in the University Clinics Radiology Department," Höveler-Müller explains. "As far as I know this has never been done before."
This world premier will now in all probability be followed by another one: "The desiccated residues of a fluid can be clearly discerned in the x-ray photographs," the museums curator explains. "Our pharmacologists are now going to analyze this sediment." The results could be available in a good years time.
If they are successful, the scientists in Bonn are even hoping to "reconstruct" the perfume so that, 3,500 years after the death of the woman amongst whose possessions it was found, the scent could then be revitalized. Hatshepsut died in 1457 B.C. Analysis of the mummy ascribed to her showed that the ruler was apparently between 45 and 60 years of age at the end of her life; that she was also overweight, and suffering from diabetes, cancer, osteoporosis and arthritis.
Interesting2: New software developed with help from the Wildlife Conservation Society will allow tiger researchers to rapidly identify individual animals by creating a three-dimensional model using photos taken by remote cameras. The software, described in an issue of the journal Biology Letters, may also help identify the origin of tigers from confiscated skins.
The new software, developed by Conservation Research Ltd., creates a 3D model from scanned photos using algorithms similar to fingerprint-matching software used by criminologists. Researchers currently calculate tiger populations by painstakingly reviewing hundreds of photos of animals caught by camera "traps" and then matching their individual stripe patterns, which are unique to each animal.
Using a formula developed by renowned tiger expert Ullas Karanth of WCS, researchers accurately estimate local populations by how many times individual tigers are "recaptured" by the camera trap technique. It is expected that the new software will allow researchers to rapidly identify animals, which in turn could speed up tiger conservation efforts.
"This new software will make it much easier for conservationists to identify individual tigers and estimate populations," said Ullas Karanth, Senior Conservation Scientist at the Wildlife Conservation Society and one of the study’s co-authors. "The fundamentals of tiger conservation are knowing how many tigers live in a study area before you can start to measure success."
The study’s authors found that the software was up to 95 percent accurate in matching tigers from scanned photos. Researches were also able to use the software to identify the origin of confiscated tiger skins based on solely on photos. Development of the software was funded through a Panthera project in collaboration with WCS.
Interesting3: NASA scientists analyzing the dust of meteorites have discovered new clues to a long-standing mystery about how life works on its most basic, molecular level. "We found more support for the idea that biological molecules, like amino acids, created in space and brought to Earth by meteorite impacts help explain why life is left-handed," said Dr. Daniel Glavin of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
"By that I mean why all known life uses only left-handed versions of amino acids to build proteins." Glavin is lead author of a paper on this research appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences March 16. Proteins are the workhorse molecules of life, used in everything from structures like hair to enzymes, the catalysts that speed up or regulate chemical reactions.
Just as the 26 letters of the alphabet are arranged in limitless combinations to make words, life uses 20 different amino acids in a huge variety of arrangements to build millions of different proteins. Amino acid molecules can be built in two ways that are mirror images of each other, like your hands. Although life based on right-handed amino acids would presumably work fine, "you can’t mix them," says Dr. Jason Dworkin of NASA Goddard, co-author of the study.
"If you do, life turns to something resembling scrambled eggs — it’s a mess. Since life doesn’t work with a mixture of left-handed and right-handed amino acids, the mystery is: how did life decide — what made life choose left-handed amino acids over right-handed ones?" Over the last four years, the team carefully analyzed samples of meteorites with an abundance of carbon, called carbonaceous chondrites.
The researchers looked for the amino acid isovaline and discovered that three types of carbonaceous meteorites had more of the left-handed version than the right-handed variety – as much as a record 18 percent more in the often-studied Murchison meteorite. "Finding more left-handed isovaline in a variety of meteorites supports the theory that amino acids brought to the early Earth by asteroids and comets contributed to the origin of only left-handed based protein life on Earth," said Glavin.
NASA scientists analyzing the dust of meteorites have discovered new clues to a long-standing mystery about how life works on its most basic, molecular level. "We found more support for the idea that biological molecules, like amino acids, created in space and brought to Earth by meteorite impacts help explain why life is left-handed," said Dr. Daniel Glavin of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "By that I mean why all known life uses only left-handed versions of amino acids to build proteins."
Glavin is lead author of a paper on this research appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences March 16. Proteins are the workhorse molecules of life, used in everything from structures like hair to enzymes, the catalysts that speed up or regulate chemical reactions. Just as the 26 letters of the alphabet are arranged in limitless combinations to make words, life uses 20 different amino acids in a huge variety of arrangements to build millions of different proteins. Amino acid molecules can be built in two ways that are mirror images of each other, like your hands.
Although life based on right-handed amino acids would presumably work fine, "you can’t mix them," says Dr. Jason Dworkin of NASA Goddard, co-author of the study. "If you do, life turns to something resembling scrambled eggs — it’s a mess. Since life doesn’t work with a mixture of left-handed and right-handed amino acids, the mystery is: how did life decide — what made life choose left-handed amino acids over right-handed ones?"
Over the last four years, the team carefully analyzed samples of meteorites with an abundance of carbon, called carbonaceous chondrites. The researchers looked for the amino acid isovaline and discovered that three types of carbonaceous meteorites had more of the left-handed version than the right-handed variety – as much as a record 18 percent more in the often-studied Murchison meteorite. "Finding more left-handed isovaline in a variety of meteorites supports the theory that amino acids brought to the early Earth by asteroids and comets contributed to the origin of only left-handed based protein life on Earth," said Glavin.
Interesting4: The long tails sported by many male birds in the tropics look like they’re a drag to carry around and a distinct disadvantage when fleeing predators, but experiments by University of California, Berkeley, biologists shows that they exact only a minimal cost in speed or energy – at least in hummingbirds. "We estimate that having a long tail increases a bird’s daily metabolic costs by 1 to 3 percent, which means the bird has to visit 1 to 3 percent more flowers in its territory," said Christopher J. Clark, a graduate student in UC Berkeley’s Department of Integrative Biology.
"Is that a lot? It’s hard to say, but we argue that it’s not, especially when compared to the costs of things like molting and migration." As a way to attract admiring females, in fact, long tail feathers may be one of the easiest ornamentations to evolve with the least consequences, the researchers say. Clark and Robert Dudley, UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology, report the results of their study in the March issue of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, which appeared online this week.
Male birds of numerous species have evolved elaborate colors and decorations to attract females, many of them involving tail feathers. The peacock’s eye-popping display, the broad, gauzy tail of the male lyre bird and the two-foot-long, iridescent green tail of the quetzal are but three examples.
Some biologists have made computer models of elongated tails, like those of the Jamaican red-billed streamertail hummingbird, the scissor-tail hummingbird or the marvelous spatuletail hummingbird, and have predicted as much as a 50 percent greater energy cost when flying with a long tail.
In his experiment, Clark outfitted short-tailed Anna’s hummingbirds (Calypte anna) with long tail feathers from a red-billed streamertail (Trochilus polytmus), giving the hummingbirds two tail feathers that were five times the normal length for an Anna’s, and put the hummers through their paces in a wind tunnel.
He and Dudley found that the hummingbirds with enhanced tail feathers suffered only a 3.4 percent drop in their maximum speed. This corresponded to an 11 percent increase in energy needed to fly at high speeds. For moderate and low speeds – the speeds at which hummingbirds typically flit from flower to flower and hover the long-tailed birds expended considerably less extra energy.
Interesting5: Feathers and other feather-like stuff are known in several so-called saurischian dinosaurs, including tyrannosaurs and maniraptors — the ancestors to modern birds. Now, feather-like structures have been found for the first time in dinosaurs other than saurischians. The finding upends paleontological thinking about feathers, suggesting they might go back to the origin of all dinosaurs, more than 200 million years.
The newest fuzzy dinosaur is a so-called heterodontosaur (Tianyulong confuciusi) and it belongs to the mainly vegetarian "ornithischian" group of dinosaurs, one of the two major groups of dinosaurs along with the frequently carnivorous saurischians. Heterodontosaurs had fox-sized bodies and lived as far back as 198 million years ago in the Cretaceous Period.
The fossil was found in the well-known Liaoning Province fossil beds in China and is described by Xioa-Ting Zheng of the Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature in China; Hai-Lu You of the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences’ Institute of Geology; and Xing Xu and Zhi-Ming Dong of the Chinese Academy of Science’s Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in the March 19 issue of the journal Nature.
The team found evidence of hollow, feather-like structures, with no branching, on the fossil creature’s neck, back and tail, some of which were more than 2 inches long. However, these structures are a far cry from the bird feathers typically found in today’s backyards.
Intersting6: Our bottled water habit has a huge environmental impact, including the amount of energy it takes to make the plastic bottles, fill them and ship them to thirsty consumers worldwide. A new study breaks down just how much energy is used at each step of the process. An estimated total of the equivalent of 32 million to 54 million barrels of oil was required to generate the energy to produce the amount of bottled water consumed in the United States in 2007, according to the study, detailed in the January-March issue of the journal Environmental Research Letters.
Of course, this is but a third of a percent of the energy that the United States consumes as a whole in a year. In 2007, the last year for which global statistics were available, more than 200 billion liters of bottled water were sold around the world, mostly in North America and Europe.
The total amount sold in the United States alone that year (33 billion liters) averages out to about 110 liters (almost 30 gallons) of water per person, according to the Beverage Marketing Corporation. Since 2001, bottled water sales have increased by 70 percent in the United States, far surpassing those of milk and beer. Only sodas have larger sales.
The energy required to produce bottled water is particularly of interest now, at a time when many nations are looking for ways to reduce their energy use and associated climate impacts. Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute, a nonpartisan research institute, and his colleague Heather Cooley recently realized that no one had done a comprehensive survey of the energy use involved in the complete production cycle of bottled water, so they took on the task.
The energy use breaks down into roughly four parts of the production cycle: that used to make the plastic and turn it into bottles, to treat the water, to fill and cap the bottles, and finally to transport them. "Energy is used in a lot of different phases," Gleick said. Most plastic bottles are made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET). Little pellets of PET are melted and fused together to make the bottle mold.
Gleick and Cooley estimated that about 1 million tons of PET were used to make plastic bottles in the United States in 2007, with 3 million tons used globally; the energy used to produce that global amount of PET and the bottles it was turned into was equivalent to about 50 billion barrels of oil, they found. (Some companies have been shifting toward using lighter-weight plastics for their bottles, which reduces the amount of PET produced by about 30 percent and would therefore lower the amount of energy required to make them.
The transition to less energy-intensive plastic is slow though, and not all companies use them.) The amount of energy involved in that first step was a surprise to Gleick: "I didn’t know how much energy it takes to make plastic or turn plastic into a bottle," he told LiveScience.
The energy required to treat water is substantially less and depends on how many treatments are used on the water and doesn’t account for the bulk of the energy spent in production. Likewise, the energy used to clean, fill, seal and label the bottles is only about 0.34 percent of the energy built into the bottle itself.
The energy used to transport the bottled water depends mainly on how far it is shipped and what transportation method is used. Air cargo is the costliest energy method, followed by truck, cargo ship and rail shipping, in that order. A different study on the carbon footprint of wine also found this breakdown of energy use for transportation methods.
In their study, Gleick and Cooley used the examples of different types of water shipped to Los Angeles: water produced locally and shipped by truck involved the least amount of energy, followed by water sent by cargo ship from Fiji, with water produced in France and shipped by cargo ship and rail having the highest energy costs.
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