March 19-20, 2009
Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Thursday afternoon:
Lihue, Kauai – 75
Honolulu, Oahu – 78
Kaneohe, Oahu – 76
Kahului, Maui – 75
Hilo, Hawaii – 73
Kailua-kona – 83
Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level – and on the highest mountains…at 4 p.m. Thursday afternoon:
Barking Sands, Kauai – 79F
Hilo, Hawaii – 67
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 Thursday afternoon:
0.66 Mount Waialaele, Kauai
0.20 Poamoho, Oahu
0.00 Molokai
0.08 Lanai
0.03 Kahoolawe
1.18 West Wailuaiki, Maui
1.77 Waiakea Uka, Big Island
Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a far away high pressure system to the north of the islands Friday. Meanwhile, upper level trough to our ENE is moving away now. Our winds will be trade winds Friday…strengthening 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
This is what we’re looking for!
Photo Credit: Google.com
The trade winds blew Thursday, but will gain strength Friday…and remain active through the upcoming weekend. A trough of low pressure is moving across our area Thursday night. This has kept the trade winds from becoming as strong as they would have otherwise been. As they become more well established Friday, they will continue blowing into early next week. They will likely be strong enough by Saturday, that we’ll see NWS issued small craft wind advisory flags going up, over those typically windiest coasts and channels around Maui and the Big Island.
An atmospheric destabilizing upper trough of low pressure, (wow that’s a lot of meteorological words!) kept most of Hawaii’s skies cloudy Thursday. The instability brought about by this low pressure system, caused a few localized heavy showers to fall here and there. As you can see from this satellite image, there’s lots of clouds overhead Thursday evening, which will keeping our starlight overnight to a minimum. The island of Kauai has broke into the clear, with Oahu not too far behind…as this slug of upper and middle level moisture shifts eastward. Here’s the looping radar image too, so you can keep track of where any showers will be falling during the night.
As mentioned in the paragraph above, we found relatively thick clouds over our islands Thursday. As this looping satellite image shows, there are still quite a few clouds from Maui County, down over the Big Island. This has been such an off and on pattern, as Monday was nice, Tuesday was wet, Wednesday was nice again…and Thursday turned wet again. By the way, check out this webcam view of Mauna Kea summit on the Big Island, where inclement conditions continue to show snowy conditions up there…that is until the sun goes down and blanks out the view after sunset.
The good thing about all of this, is that things will change back to the positive side of the weather spectrum…as we move into the upcoming weekend. You may have noticed that I didn’t include Friday in that perspective. I would have liked to, but as the upper disturbance moves away to the east, we will see a chunk of residual cold air left in its wake. This may keep the windward sides of the islands still a bit wet during the last work day of the week. There may be some afternoon clouds and showers over the larger islands of Maui and the Big Island locally too. Elsewhere, I’d say that there’s a very good chance of much more sunshine Friday however. This weekend, and I’m not quite ready to say "trust me on this", looks like it should have greatly improved weather.
I’m about ready to leave Kihei, for the drive back upcountry to Kula. It’s been a big day, in terms of lots going on in the world of weather, here in paradise. As I do everyday, let me look out the window, and see what’s cookin’ out there. Oops, it’s as cloudy as heck out there again, with light rain falling. I must say, after looking at clouds and showers falling outside of this office all day, I’m ready to get out there myself! It gets me looking forward to getting back home, throwing on my rain jacket, and heading out for my evening walkabout. ~~~ I will be back with your next new weather narrative early Friday morning, you can trust me on this fact. Wow, as of 845pm Thursday evening, there had been 18,702 page impressions on this website, with 334 clicks on my google ads…I’m impressed! Thanks so much to all of you, who use this site as your weather information source. Have a great Thursday night! Aloha for now…Glenn.
Interesting: A fossil from famous shale deposits in Canada was thought to be unremarkable, but a new study finds that it’s actually the remains of a 500-million-year-old monster-looking predator. The Burgess Shale (a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the Canadian Rockies of British Columbia) has yielded exceptionally well-preserved fossils that present a remarkable snapshot of Cambrian marine life from 505 million years ago.
The first fragments of the monster fossil (a species called Hurdia victoria) were described nearly 100 years ago, and at the time, they were thought to be part of a crustacean-like animal, and other parts were subsequently described as multiple organisms including jellyfish, sea cucumbers and other arthropods. Now it’s clear that Hurdia was a relatively large predatory animal, possibly up to 1.5 feet (0.5 meter) in length.
It had a segmented body with a head bearing a pair of spiny claws and a circular jaw structure with many teeth. "Finding a complete fossilized animal is extremely rare. Soft tissues tend to decay rapidly after death, and harder parts tend to disarticulate or break into pieces, often leaving very few clues as to what the original animals looked like," said Jean-Bernard Caron of the Royal Ontario Museum, which houses many Burgess Shale fossils, including pieces of Hurdia.
A study of the fossil by Caron and his colleagues, detailed in the March 20 issue of the journal Science, sheds light on the origin of the largest group of living animals, the arthropods — a group that includes insects, crustaceans, spiders, millipedes and centipedes.
Interesting2: Fire fighters are still our heroes, but a new study raises concerns about their health and mobility. Researchers found that more than 75 percent of emergency responder candidates for fire and ambulance services in Massachusetts are either overweight or obese. The findings, in the March 19 issue of the journal Obesity, have significant consequences for public health and safety.
Emergency responders (firefighters, ambulance personnel and police) are expected to be physically fit to perform strenuous duties without compromising the safety of themselves, colleagues or the community. Traditionally, these professions recruited persons of above-average fitness from a pool of healthy young adults.
However, given the current obesity epidemic, the candidate pool is currently drawn from an increasingly heavy American youth. The researchers from Boston University School of Medicine, Boston Medical Center, Harvard University and the Cambridge Health Alliance reviewed the pre-placement medical examinations of firefighter and ambulance recruits from two Massachusetts clinics between October 2004 and June 2007.
Candidates older than 35 and those who had failed their services’ minimum criteria were excluded from the study in order to focus only on young recruits and those most likely to go on to gain employment as emergency responders. Among the 370 recruits, only about 22 percent were of normal weight; 43.8 percent were overweight, and 33 percent were obese.
According to the study’s results, today’s young recruits are significantly heavier than older veteran firefighters from the 1980s and 1990s. The researchers showed that excess weight as measured by body mass index (BMI) was associated with higher blood pressures, worse metabolic profiles and lower exercise tolerance on treadmill stress tests.
All normal weight recruits achieved a National Fire Protection Agency’s recommended minimum exercise threshold of 12 metabolic equivalents, while 7 percent of overweight and 42 percent of obese recruits failed to reach this criteria.
Interesting3: New Zealand’s biggest retail variety chain, The Warehouse, will start charging 10 New Zealand cents (about 5 US cents) for plastic shopping bags next month to protect the environment, according to news reports. The company, which has 128 variety and discount stationery stores, says it wants to take 20 million bags out of circulation in the next year.
The Warehouse, which is New Zealand’s biggest footwear and music retailer, said that surveys at four trial stores revealed that 85 per cent of customers would not use plastic bags if they had to pay for them. The stores will sell reusable shopping bags for 1 New Zealand dollar.
New Zealand has reduced the use of plastic bags by about 100 million a year since a number of retail chains signed a packaging accord to discourage them in 2004, the New Zealand Herald reported.
Interesting4: Recommendations to increase fish consumption because of health benefits may not be environmentally sustainable and more research is needed to clarify the benefits of omega-3 fatty acids, writes Dr. David Jenkins of St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto and coauthors in an analysis in Canadian Medical Association Journal. Health agencies and the medical community around the world recommend the consumption of fish for health benefits and people in developed countries have been urged to increase their consumption of fatty fish 2 to 3 fold.
However, there has been insufficient attention given to studies that fail to show a significant health benefit from omega-3 fatty acids and the evidence that while some may benefit, others may not. This analysis looks at the evidence for the health benefits of fish.
The authors point out that even at current fish consumption levels, global fisheries are in severe crisis as demand outstrips supply and declining stocks are being diverted from local markets to affluent markets, with serious consequences for the food security of poorer countries and coastal communities.
Global stocks have been declining since the late 1980s and there have been more than 100 cases of marine extinctions. "These trends imply the collapse of all commercially exploited stocks by mid-century," state the authors. "Yet the dire status of fisheries resources is largely unrecognized by the public, who are both encouraged to eat more fish and are misled into believing we live in a sea of plenty."
Interesting5: A new article published in The Milbank Quarterly explores how food prices can affect weight outcomes, revealing that pricing interventions can have a significant effect on obesity rates. Raising the prices of less healthy foods (e.g., fast foods and sugary products) and lowering the prices of healthier foods (e.g., fruits and vegetables) are associated with lower body weight and lesser likelihood of obesity.
Children and adolescents, the poor, and those already at a higher weight are most responsive to these changes in prices. Small taxes on unhealthy food items or small subsidies for healthy foods are not likely to produce substantial changes in BMI or obesity prevalence while nontrivial pricing interventions may have a measurable effect on Americans’ weight outcomes.
“This review provides evidence about the potential effectiveness of using food pricing policies to affect weight outcomes, including the potential impact of excise and other taxes on less healthy products and of subsidies for more healthy products,” the authors conclude.
Interesting6: Using the natural glue that marine mussels use to stick to rocks, and a variation on the inkjet printer, a team of researchers led by North Carolina State University has devised a new way of making medical adhesives that could replace traditional sutures and result in less scarring, faster recovery times and increased precision for exacting operations such as eye surgery.
Traditionally, there have been two ways to join tissue together in the wake of a surgery: sutures and synthetic adhesives. Sutures work well, but require enormous skill and longer operating times. Additionally, the use of sutures is associated with a number of surgical complications, including discomfort, infection and inflammation. Synthetic adhesives are also widely used, but they are the source of increasing concerns over their toxicological and environmental effects.
One such concern with some synthetic medical adhesives is that – because they are not biodegradable – they do not break down in the body and therefore may cause inflammation, tissue damage, or other problems. But new research shows that adhesive proteins found in the "glue" produced by marine mussels may be used in place of the synthetic adhesives without these concerns, because they are non-toxic and biodegradable, according to study co-author Dr. Roger Narayan.
In addition, the mussel proteins can be placed in solution and applied using inkjet technology to create customized medical adhesives, which may have a host of applications. For example, Narayan says this technique may "significantly improve wound repair in eye surgery, wound closure and fracture fixation." Narayan is an associate professor in the joint biomedical engineering department of NC State and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Interesting7: A lost humpback whale’s efforts to find it way out of busy shipping lanes around Hong Kong, was Thursday enthralling people in the former British colony. The plight of the 10-metre adult whale has for two days made television and newspaper headlines in the normally money-obsessed city, providing an unexpected distraction from a tide of bleak economic news.
The humpback whale, the first ever seen in Hong Kong waters, is believed to have become separated from a group of whales migrating from the tropical waters where they spend winter to their summertime Arctic feeding grounds. It was first spotted surfacing, raising its tail and exhaling water through its blow hole Monday and Tuesday in busy shipping lanes close to Hong Kong’s landmark Victoria Harbour.
On Wednesday night, it had moved to the south of Hong Kong island and appeared to be heading eastward to the usual northerly migration route for whales in the South China Sea. However, a kayak paddler who tailed it for several hours Thursday said it appeared to be no closer to the open sea and was disoriented and confused by heavy shipping passing close to it.
Experts said they believe the whale is healthy and if it can find its way into open waters, it should be able to rejoin other whales and continue its route toward the Arctic. However, boatloads of sightseers with cameras have headed out to try to track the whale since it was first sighted, and an appeal has been issued for people not to sail too close to the lost whale.
There were also concerns that there is a lack of food for the whale in Hong Kong’s heavily polluted waters, where fish stocks are critically low, and the whale could weaken if it fails to find its way out soon. Whale expert Samuel Hung Ha-yiu, head of a research centre on dolphins and porpoises, said trying to guide the mammal toward open waters could be counter-productive.
"We recommend the government refrain from doing anything outside of monitoring the animal," he said, adding that trying to usher it out would raise its stress levels and risk it becoming beached.
Interesting8: With Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and high school and college graduations upcoming, there will be plenty of gift-giving and well wishes. When those start pouring in, let yourself be grateful—it’s the best way to achieve happiness according to several new studies conducted by Todd Kashdan, associate professor of psychology at George Mason University.
Gratitude, the emotion of thankfulness and joy in response to receiving a gift, is one of the essential ingredients for living a good life, Kashdan says. Kashdan’s most recent paper, which was recently published online at the Journal of Personality, reveals that when it comes to achieving well-being, gender plays a role.
He found that men are much less likely to feel and express gratitude than women. “Previous studies on gratitude have suggested that there might be a difference in gender, and so we wanted to explore this further—and find out why. Even if it is a small effect, it could make a huge difference in the long run,” says Kashdan.
In one study, Kashdan interviewed college-aged students and older adults, asking them to describe and evaluate a recent episode in which they received a gift. He found that women compared with men reported feeling less burden and obligation and greater levels of gratitude when presented with gifts.
In addition, older men reported greater negative emotions when the gift giver was another man. “The way that we get socialized as children affects what we do with our emotions as adults,” says Kashdan. “Because men are generally taught to control and conceal their softer emotions, this may be limiting their well-being.”
Interesting9: Hippos spend lots of time in the water and now it turns out (or researchers argue), they are the closest living relative to whales. It also turns out, the two are swimming in a bit of controversy. Jessica Theodor, an associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Calgary, and her colleague Jonathan Geisler, associate professor at Georgia Southern University are disputing a recent study that creates a different family tree for the hippo.
That research was published in Nature in December 2007 by J. G. M. Thewissen, a professor at Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine, and his colleagues. Thewissen says that whales are more closely linked to an extinct pig-like animal, often known as India’s pig or Indohyus, while hippos are closely related to living pigs. But this isn’t accurate according to Theodor."
What Thewissen is saying is that Indohyus is the closest relative of whales – and we agree. Where we think he is wrong, is that he is saying that that hippos are more closely related to true pigs than they are to whales," says Theodor. "This contradicts most of the data from DNA from the last 12 or 13 years. Those data place hippos as the closest living relative to whales."
She says Thewissen did not use DNA evidence, instead used fossil evidence alone to create a family tree and reach the conclusion that hippos have more in common with pigs than whales. "And the reason their tree is so different is simple: by excluding all the DNA information they left out all the data that shows a strong relationship between whales and hippos."
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