March 2-3, 2009
Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Monday afternoon:
Lihue, Kauai – 73
Honolulu, Oahu – 80
Kaneohe, Oahu – 76
Kahului, Maui – 76
Hilo, Hawaii – 72
Kailua-kona – 78
Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level – and on the highest mountains…at 4 p.m. Monday afternoon:
Kailual-kona – 79F
Kapalua, Maui – 70
Haleakala Crater – 43 (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 34 (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:
0.67 Mount Waialeale, Kauai
0.32 Oahu Forest NWR, Oahu
0.05 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.00 Kahoolawe
1.20 Puu Kukui, Maui
0.87 Honokaa, Big Island
Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a strong 1036 millibar high pressure system located far to the north-northwest of the islands. This high pressure system will cause locally strong and gusty trade winds Tuesday and Wednesday.
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
The strong trade winds will continue into Tuesday…and then begin a gradually reduction through the rest of the week. Looking at this latest weather map, we find the same strong, although reduced 1035 millibar high pressure system, in the area north-northwest of Hawaii Monday night. The winds being generated by this still fairly potent high pressure systrem, will keep all of the NWS advisories in place today. These include the small craft wind advisories active across all of Hawaii’s coasts and channel waters, along with a high surf advisory for surf breaking along our east facing beaches. The wind advisory has now been pared back to just the area around Kahoolawe, and around some parts of the Big Island. In addition, the gale warning has been pulled back to include just those windiest areas between Maui and Molokai, and between Maui and the Big Island…and the southeast waters of the Big Island itself.
NWS wind advisory: STRONG NORTHEAST WINDS OF 15 TO 30 MPH WITH GUSTS TO 50 MPH WILL CONTINUE THROUGH EARLY TUESDAY MORNING. THE HIGHEST WIND SPEEDS WILL OCCUR WHERE THE WIND BLOWS THROUGH VALLEYS, OVER RIDGES, AROUND HEADLANDS AND DOWNSLOPE ON THE SOUTHWEST, LEEWARD SIDES OF THE ISLANDS. THE STRONGEST WINDS MAY BE VERY LOCALIZED.
There will continue to be off and on passing showers along the windward sides through mid-week…then conditions will become more showery Thursday into the upcoming weekend. The showers falling at the moment, will continue arriving along the north and east sides of the islands, and will generally be quite light. There will continue to be some isolated showers that will be heavier, especially in the mountains on Maui and the Big Island. As the winds turn more easterly, they will begin to bring more shower bearing clouds our way. The leeward sides will for the most part remain dry, although off and on filled with high cirrus clouds during the days.
We’re near the end of this strong wind event, which will be over later Tuesday into Wednesday. The winds are generally the lightest during the morning hours, which increase during the late morning through early evening hours. The following numbers represented the strongest gusts (mph) on each of the islands at around 5pm Monday evening:
Kauai: 36
Oahu: 38
Molokai: 38
Maui: 43
Kahoolawe: 44
Lanai: 43
Big Island: 43
It’s early Monday evening as I begin writing this last section of today’s weather narrative. As noted in the paragraphs above, it will still be windy overnight Monday, but likely the strongest aspect of this event will soon be behind us. It will remain gusty though, and as the winds finally turn from the cool northeast direction, towards a more customary ENE and easterly flow…we will begin to warm-up more over the next couple of days. It certainly has been chilly during the last week, and I’m sure that folks here in the islands are ready to shift back into a more normal temperature regime!
~~~ We will see clouds around, generally being brought in our direction on the still gusty trade winds. At the same time however, we will see more of those sun dimming cirrus clouds, which have moved over the state from the west…as they have been doing in an off and on manner for the last week. As this satellite image shows, there are more of those icy high clouds that have slid over us during the day Monday into the night. It appears quite likely that we will continue to see more of these high clouds arriving, in an off and on manner, as we move through the rest of this week.
~~~ As an overview, the main thing that happened today, besides the continuation of the strong and gusty winds, was the return of those thick high cirrus clouds. This certainly isn’t anything new, and has been happening quite a bit lately, lately being the last week or more. The winds kept up today as well, and were gusting well up into the 40 mph range at those windiest spots around the state…just short of 50 mph as a matter of fact! As I look out the window here in Kihei, before leaving for the drive upcountry to Kula, it is what I would call mostly cloudy.
~~~ Temperatures did moderate some today, now that our winds are more out of the ENE, or even easterly…qualifying as trade winds once again. Geez, the winds finally are on the down swing, or will be pretty soon, and then, well, here comes the high clouds again…and then increased showery weather along our windward sides during the second half of the week! Oh well, all I can do is report it like I see it – smile. I’ll be back very early Tuesday morning with your next new weather narrative from paradise. I hope you have a great Monday night from wherever you happen to be reading from! Aloha for now…Glenn.
Interesting: Rescuers used jet skis, backhoes and human muscle, to save dozens of whales and dolphins, stranded on a beach in southern Australia Monday. The 194 pilot whales and half a dozen bottlenose dolphins became stranded on Naracoopa Beach on Tasmania state’s King Island on Sunday evening — the fourth beaching incident in recent months in Tasmania. Strandings happen periodically in Tasmania as whales go by during their migration to and from Antarctic waters, but scientists do not know why it happens.
It is unusual, however, for whales and dolphins to get stranded together. Chris Arthur, of Tasmania’s Parks and Wildlife Service, said 54 whales and seven dolphins were still alive when the rescue effort began. By late Monday, 48 animals had been returned to the sea by officials and more than 100 King Island residents who had volunteered to help. Backhoes dug trenches in the sand that allowed water to get close to the whales, as volunteers doused them with water and draped wet fabric over them to keep them cool.
Interesting2: Many native fishes in the Pacific Northwest are threatened or endangered, notably salmonids, and hundreds of millions of dollars are expended annually on researching their populations and on amelioration efforts. Most of the attention and funding have been directed toward to the impacts of habitat alteration, hatcheries, harvest, and the hydro-system—the "all H’s." A study published in the March 2009 issue of BioScience concludes, however, that non-indigenous species, notably invasive fishes, appear to pose at least as much of a threat to native salmonids as the all H’s, principally through predation.
The study, by Beth L. Sanderson of the Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle, Washington and two colleagues, made use of a spatially explicit database that identified the presence of invasive species in roughly 1800-square-kilometer, hydrologically connected areas throughout Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. The number of invasive species in each area ranged between 86 and 486, the majority being plants and fish. Sanderson and colleagues assembled reports of predation by six non-indigenous fish species: catfish, black and white crappie, largemouth bass, smallmouth bass, walleye, and yellow perch.
Hundreds of thousands to millions of juvenile salmonids were being consumed by these species at just a handful of sites, and for some of the species, salmonids constituted a large fraction of their diet. Yet despite the clear evidence of a substantial impact of invasive species on economically important salmonids, only a very small percentage of research funding is devoted to the potential harms to salmon resulting from invasives.
Interesting3: While it is almost a certainty that within the next few decades, humanity will experience another influenza pandemic, it may not be caused by the avian influenza strain H5N1 that many scientists believe could be a prime candidate. "We continue to be aroused and some nearly panicked by the threat of a flu pandemic caused by the avian influenza virus, H5N1. Is this anxiety justified? In the more than 15 years since it was first recognized, this bird flu virus has yet cause very much mortality in humans or evolve to be readily transmitted between people," says Bruce Levin, the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Biology at Emory University.
Nevertheless, because of the high case mortality of humans infected with H5N1 (sometimes exceeding 90%), pandemic influenza caused by this avian virus has appropriately stimulated a great deal of research on the microbiology, immunology, pathology, virulence, epidemiology and evolution of influenza. It has also contributed to a renaissance of interest in the great influenza of 1918, says Levin. "The next pandemic could well have the potential to kill as many or more people than that in 1918, but we are far better prepared to deal with the next influenza pandemic than we were that of 1918," says Levin.
Interesting4: Tropical forests hold more living biomass than any other terrestrial ecosystem. A new report in the journal Nature by Lewis et al. shows that not only do trees in intact African tropical forests hold a lot of carbon, they hold more carbon now than they did 40 years ago–a hopeful sign that tropical forests could help to mitigate global warming. In a companion article, Helene Muller-Landau, staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, says that understanding the causes of this African forest carbon sink and projecting its future is anything but straightforward.
Growing trees absorb carbon. Dead, decomposing trees release carbon. Researchers expect growth and death to approximately balance each other out in mature, undisturbed forests, and thus for total tree carbon stocks, the carbon held by the trees, to remain approximately constant. Yet Lewis and colleagues discovered that on average each hectare (100 x 100 meters, or 2.2 acres) of apparently mature, undisturbed African forest was increasing in tree carbon stocks by an amount equal to the weight of a small car each year. Previous studies have shown that Amazonian forests also take up carbon, although at somewhat lower rates.
"If you assume that these forests should be in equilibrium, then the best way to explain why trees are growing bigger is anthropogenic global change – the extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could essentially be acting as fertilizer." says Muller-Landau, "But it’s also possible that tropical forests are still growing back following past clearing or fire or other disturbance. Given increasing evidence that tropical forests have a long history of human occupation, recovery from past disturbance is almost certainly part of the reason these forests are taking up carbon today.
Interesting5: It’s increasingly likely that the fish you eat was farmed not caught wild, according to the latest statistics of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. The group’s two-yearly assessment of world fisheries, published today, comes with mitigated good news. The outlook for wild ocean fish remains gloomy: 80% of all fisheries are at or beyond their maximum yields, and over-fishing continues to climb.
Yet the amount of fish available to eat is growing faster than the human population, thanks to a boom in fish farming. The FAO calculates that, for the first time, fish farms produce half the fish we eat, up from less than a third in 2002. With wild-catch fisheries maxed out, any more increases in fish production will depend on farms. Many farmed fish eat fishmeal and oil, made from small species like sardines.
The FAO says the tonnage of these species consumed has trebled since 1992, but does not say whether this is a consequence of fish farming, or because the fish are being used for other purposes. In a parallel report, international fisheries pressure group Oceana charges that by relying on wild-caught species like sardines, which now constitute one third of world fisheries, fish farms are starving larger predators, including tuna, marine mammals and seabirds.
The FAO observes that the unrestricted competition between companies is a waste of energy: too many boats mean that fewer fish are caught per litre of boat fuel. Meanwhile, boat owners buy more powerful, less efficient engines to beat the competition.
Interesting6: Giant sand dunes are thought to form when smaller dunes crash into each other and pile up. To investigate if anything limits their size, Bruno Andreotti at the Denis Diderot University, Paris, and colleagues calculated what the atmospheric flow looks like around giant dunes. They found that the thickness of the lowest layer of the atmosphere – the boundary layer – controls dune size, with a thicker layer leading to larger dunes. "Once the dune becomes big enough to interact with the boundary layer it creates waves in the air.
These waves feed back and interact with the sand below, keeping a lid on the dune size," explains co-author Brad Murray of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Warmer air increases the thickness of the boundary layer, which explains why Earth’s largest dunes are found inland, in the hottest part of the desert. It also suggests that if global warming heats the planet in the right place, then dunes could get bigger.
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