March 20-21, 2009
Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Friday afternoon:
Lihue, Kauai – 76
Honolulu, Oahu – 83
Kaneohe, Oahu – 77
Kahului, Maui – 80
Hilo, Hawaii – 78
Kailua-kona – 81
Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level – and on the highest mountains…at 4 p.m. Friday afternoon:
Honolulu, Oahu – 81F
Lihue, Kauai – 74
Haleakala Crater – missing (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 30 (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 Friday afternoon:
2.14 Mount Waialaele, Kauai
0.42 Manoa Lyon Arboretum, Oahu
0.01 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.04 Kahoolawe
0.13 Mahinahina, Maui
0.94 Kamuela Upper, Big Island
Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a 1030+ millibar high pressure system to the north of the islands. Meanwhile, upper level trough to our ENE continues moving away. Our trade winds will be strengthening Saturday into Sunday.
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
A humpback whale doing its thing…big time!
Photo Credit: Google.com
The trade winds will fill our Hawaiian Island weather picture through the weekend…and beyond. These moderately strong trades have become more well established now, and will continue blowing through most of the next week…if not longer. They have become strong enough now, that the NWS forecast office in Honolulu has issued small craft wind advisory flags, in those windiest places around Maui and the Big Island. This advisory won’t be short lived, and remains officially in force, through this coming Monday afternoon at 4pm. The truth is that there’s no end in sight for these balmy trade wind breezes.
The atmosphere has become dry and stable now, which will provide generally sunny skies…with just a few windward showers at times. Our weather will be really nice, attracting lots of people outside this weekend. As you can see from this satellite image, the entire island chain is mostly clear now, giving us a chance to finally bask in some warm Hawaiian sunshine for a change! The few showers that will fall will arrive with the trade winds, along the windward sides. Daytime temperatures will be on the rise, with many sea level beaches topping-out in the lower 80F’s both Saturday and Sunday.
It’s Friday evening, and I’m now off work for the next two days. I had planned on going to see the new film called Duplicity (2009) this evening…starring the handsome Clive Owens, and the good looking Julia Roberts. My schedule has changed however, as my friend, whose having the health issues, called and asked if I wanted to have dinner together. I of course accepted, and invited her out to the Kula Lodge. I’m sure that we’ll have good conversations as usual, and I look forward to being with her. ~~~ On another note, I have a hike planned with the West Maui Mountains Watershed Partnership, into the West Maui Mountains, early Saturday morning. I’m meeting two good friends in Kahului early Saturday morning, and then driving over to Napili to join this hiking group. I’m very much looking forward to hiking into the Maunalei Arboretum. There are Native Hawaiian plant species, as well as other plants from around the world. This is a first time hike up into those mountains, and I’m excited! ~~~ I’m getting ready to leave Kihei, for the drive to my friend’s house in lower Kula – let me look out the window and see what’s happening out there. Just as I thought, it’s mostly clear, with just some scattered cumulus clouds floating around in the strengthening trade wind flow. I’ll be back very early Saturday morning, with your next new weather narrative, up early as I’ll be leaving early for the hiking experience. I look forward to joining you here again then, I hope you have a great Friday night! Aloha for now…Glenn.
Interesting: Want to know what will make you happy? Then ask a total stranger — or so says a new study from Harvard University, which shows that another person’s experience is often more informative than your own best guess. The study, which appears in the current issue of Science, was led by Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard and author of the 2007 bestseller "Stumbling on Happiness," along with Matthew Killingsworth and Rebecca Eyre, also of Harvard, and Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia.
"If you want to know how much you will enjoy an experience, you are better off knowing how much someone else enjoyed it than knowing anything about the experience itself," says Gilbert. "Rather than closing our eyes and imagining the future, we should examine the experience of those who have been there."
Previous research in psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics has shown that people have difficulty predicting what they will like and how much they will like it, which leads them to make a wide variety of poor decisions. Interventions aimed at improving the accuracy with which people imagine future events have been generally unsuccessful.
So rather than trying to improve human imagination, Gilbert and his colleagues sought to eliminate it from the equation by asking people to predict how much they would enjoy a future event about which they knew absolutely nothing — except how much a total stranger had enjoyed it. Amazingly enough, those people made extremely accurate predictions.
Interesting2: By combining data from 48 studies of coral reefs from around the Caribbean, researchers have found that fish densities that have been stable for decades have given way to significant declines since 1995. "We were most surprised to discover that this decrease is evident for both large-bodied species targeted by fisheries as well as small-bodied species that are not fished," said Michelle Paddack of Simon Fraser University in Canada.
"This suggests that overfishing is probably not the only cause." Rather, they suggest that the recent declines may be explained by drastic losses in coral cover and other changes in coral reef habitats that have occurred in the Caribbean over the past 30 years.
Those changes are the result of many factors, including warming ocean temperatures, coral diseases, and a rise in sedimentation and pollution from coastal development. Overfishing has also led to declines of many fish species, and now seems to also be removing those that are important for keeping the reefs free of algae.
"All of these factors are stressing the reefs and making them less able to recover from disturbances such as hurricanes, which also seem to be occurring more frequently," Paddack said. Scientists had previously documented historical declines in the abundance of large Caribbean reef fishes that probably reflect centuries of overexploitation. However, effects of recent degradation of reef habitats on reef fish had not been established before now.
Interesting3: Nearly one-third of all U.S. bird species are endangered, threatened or in significant decline, with birds in Hawaii facing a "borderline ecological disaster," scientists reported. The State of the Birds report, issued by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar along with conservation groups and university ornithologists, also noted some successes, including the recovery of the bald eagle, the peregrine falcon and other species after the banning of the chemical DDT.
"When we talk about birds and we talk about wildlife, we’re also talking about the economics of this country," Salazar told reporters as the report was released. Wildlife watching and recreation generate $122 billion annually, the report said. Salazar mentioned revenue from hunting, fishing and bird-watching, but added that President Barack Obama’s stimulus package and proposed federal budgets for the remainder of 2009 and 2010 offer more money for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which aims to protect birds and other creatures.
Interesting4: Salty, liquid water has been detected on a leg of the Mars Phoenix Lander and therefore could be present at other locations on the planet, according to analysis by a group of mission scientists led by a University of Michigan professor. This is the first time liquid water has been detected and photographed outside the Earth. "A large number of independent physical and thermodynamical evidence shows that saline water may actually be common on Mars," said Nilton Renno, a professor in the U-M Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences and a co-investigator on the Phoenix mission.
"Liquid water is an essential ingredient for life. This discovery has important implications to many areas of planetary exploration, including the habitability of Mars." Renno will present these findings March 23 at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston. Previously, scientists believed that water existed on Mars only as ice or water vapor because of the planet’s low temperature and atmospheric pressure.
They thought that ice in the Red Planet’s current climate could sublimate, or vaporize, but they didn’t think it could melt. This analysis shows how that assumption may be incorrect. Temperature fluctuation in the arctic region of Mars where Phoenix landed and salts in the soil could create pockets of water too salty to freeze in the climate of the landing site, Renno says. Photos of one of the lander’s legs show droplets that grew during the polar summer.
Based on the temperature of the leg and the presence of large amounts of "perchlorate" salts detected in the soil, scientists believe the droplets were most likely salty liquid water and mud that splashed on the spacecraft when it touched down.
The lander was guided down by rockets whose exhaust melted the top layer of ice below a thin sheet of soil. Some of the mud droplets that splashed on the lander’s leg appear to have grown by absorbing water from the atmosphere, Renno says. Images suggest that some of the droplets darkened, then moved and merged—physical evidence that they were liquid.
Interesting5: As any parent knows, children love sweet-tasting foods. Now, new research from the University of Washington and the Monell Center indicates that this heightened liking for sweetness has a biological basis and is related to children’s high growth rate. "The relationship between sweet preference and growth makes intuitive sense because when growth is rapid, caloric demands increase.
Children are programmed to like sweet taste because it fills a biological need by pushing them towards energy sources," said Monell geneticist Danielle Reed, PhD, one of the study authors. Across cultures, children prefer higher levels of sweetness in their foods as compared to adults, a pattern that declines during adolescence.
To explore the biological underpinnings of this shift, Reed and University of Washington researcher Susan Coldwell, PhD, looked at sweet preference and biological measures of growth and physical maturation in 143 children between the ages of 11 and 15.
The findings, reported in the journal Physiology & Behavior, suggest that children’s heightened liking for sweet taste is related to their high growth rate and that sweet preferences decline as children’s physical growth slows and eventually stops.
Interesting6: Robot fish developed by British scientists are to be released into the sea off north Spain to detect pollution. If next year’s trial of the first five robotic fish in the northern Spanish port of Gijon is successful, the team hopes they will be used in rivers, lakes and seas across the world. The carp-shaped robots, costing 20,000 pounds ($29,000) apiece, mimic the movement of real fish and are equipped with chemical sensors to sniff out potentially hazardous pollutants, such as leaks from vessels or underwater pipelines. They will transmit the information back to shore using Wi-Fi technology. Unlike earlier robotic fish, which needed remote controls, they will be able to navigate independently without any human interaction.
Interesting7: The volume of toxic chemicals that were released into the environment or sent for disposal in 2007 dropped 5 percent compared with 2006, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. But concealed within the overall numbers was good and bad news. For example, the volume of released or disposed "persistent, bio-accumulative and toxic chemicals," substances like lead, dioxin, mercury and PCBs, was up slightly, the agency said.
Most of those releases were not to air or water, the agency said, meaning that the material was mostly buried in landfills, injected into deep wells or held in impoundments. The number given for PCBs was up by 40 percent, but "it’s good news." said Michael P. Flynn, acting deputy assistant administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Environmental Information.
The E.P.A. banned production of PCBs 30 years ago, so pounds counted now, Mr. Flynn said, represent electrical transformers or other equipment being taken out of service and PCBs disposed of in qualified facilities. The material released or disposed of in 2007 came to almost 4.1 billion pounds. More than 20 billion pounds, about five times as much material, was recycled, treated to render it nontoxic or burned for energy, the agency said.
Interesting8: The world’s oldest champagne, bottled before Victoria became Queen, is still drinkable, with notes of "truffles and caramel", according to the experts. An "addictive" bottle of 1825 Perrier-Jouet was opened at a ceremony attended by 12 of the world’s top wine tasters. Their verdict: the 184-year-old champagne tasted better than some of its younger counterparts.
There are now just two 1825 vintage bottles left – and Perrier-Jouet has no plans to open them soon. The wine and champagne experts convened at the winemaker’s cellars in Epernay in France, for a "once in a lifetime" tasting of the 1825 champagne – officially recognised by Guinness World Records as the world’s oldest.
British wine writer John Stimpfig described the "reverential silence" as Perrier-Jouet cellar master Herve Deschamps eased out the cork, followed by a round of applause as the champagne was poured. "It was a memorable evening, and tasting the wine was like tasting history in a bottle," he said. As for the flavour of a wine bottled just 10 years after the battle of Waterloo, Mr Stimpfig said he drank it more out of curiosity than for pleasure.
He said: "The wine was heavily oxidised, with a sherry-like character. "However I did taste notes of truffles, caramel and mushrooms. "Most of the bubbles had disappeared, although there was a slight spritz left." But Serena Sutcliffe, the head of Sotheby’s international wine department, who helped organise the tasting event, described the wine as "addictive" with a complex flavour of figs and even a "slight nose of the sea". She said:
"What was interesting was that I preferred the 1825 champagne to later vintages we tasted, dating from 1846, 1848 and 1874." She said each sip would have been worth "hundreds of pounds" if it had been sold at auction, but added: "It is virtually impossible to assign a value to the 1825 vintage – we’ve never seen anything like it on the market."
Wine tastes have changed over the past 184 years – the 1825 vintage was sweet, and even had a little brandy added at the "topping-up" stage. But it was this very sweetness that experts believe helped the wine to survive for so long, together with the five to six atmospheres of pressure within the bottle.
No guarantees "It’s the bubbles that kept it younger," said Ms Sutcliffe. She added there was no guarantee that the remaining two bottles of 1825 would be as drinkable as the one she and fellow experts sampled, to mark the release of a new Perrier-Jouet vintage. "They could last for years, and they might be better or worse, " she said.
"At this age, wine tends to go its own way and a lot depends on the cork which in the case of the champagne we drank was in very good condition." Mr Deschamps said Perrier-Jouet intended to keep the remaining two bottles for some years yet. "I don’t expect I will ever open another bottle like it," he said.
Interesting9: Life would be meaningless and not worth living without the internet, nearly one in seven Hong Kong youngsters said in a survey released Friday. Just under 14 per cent of 1,800 respondents aged 12 to 25 insisted they could not live without the internet while 80 per cent described it as essential.
One-quarter of respondents in the high-rise, high-tech city of 7 million, where 77 per cent of households have broadband access, said they used the internet for more than four hours a day. The Hong Kong Federation of Youth Groups, which conducted the survey, said Hong Kong youngsters who spent too long online slept badly, engaged in too little exercise and risked failing eyesight.
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