March 26-27, 2009
Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Thursday afternoon:
Lihue, Kauai – 75
Honolulu, Oahu – 81
Kaneohe, Oahu – 76
Kahului, Maui – 78
Hilo, Hawaii – 76
Kailua-kona – 80
Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level – and on the highest mountains…at 5 p.m. Thursday evening:
Barking Sands, Kauai – 78F
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:
2.88 Mount Waialaele, Kauai
1.38 Oahu Forest NWR, Oahu
0.05 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.00 Kahoolawe
2.54 Puu Kukui, Maui
3.00 Glenwood, Big Island
Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a strong 1037 millibar high pressure system far to the northeast of the islands. Our trade winds will be moderate to locally strong and gusty Friday and Saturday…lighter in those more protected places.
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 beauty of the islands!
Photo Credit: Google.com
The gusty trade winds will remain the dominate weather feature into the weekend…and beyond. A strong 1038 millibar high pressure system remains the source of these strong and gusty winds Thursday night. These winds are strong enough to keep small craft wind advisories active across most of the Hawaiian coastal and channel waters, from Kauai down through the Big Island. Those areas that are more protected from the trade winds will have lighter winds as usual. The high surf advisory remains active in response to the large waves generated by these gusty trade winds…along the east facing windward shores.
The leeward sides may see an occasional shower, while the windward sides, and some mountain areas…will see the most generous passing showers. Looking at this satellite image, we see that the cirrus clouds to our west are extending into the state, which suggests that we’ll have a nice colorful sunset Thursday evening. This larger view shows the extent of this cirrus to our west, associated with a trough of low pressure. At lower levels of the atmosphere, we see some moisture pockets being carried in our direction, which looks to be a bit more productive to the east, so that we’ll see intrusions of showers at times overnight into Friday.
The direction of our trade winds continues to show a slight veering to the south of east…although that will come to an end soon. The trade winds typically blow from the east-northeast to east. As a low pressure system to our NW moves away overnight into Friday, a more typical east to ENE wind flow will arrive soon…sticking around through the weekend. Some of the computer models are showing a trough of low pressure edging closer early next week, which may help to diminish our trade wind speeds, and could increase our showers around Tuesday for a couple of days.
Last evening I went to see a film at the Maui Arts and Cultural Center in Kahului, since today is a holiday here in the islands. The film was called Owl and the Sparrow (2007). The story happens in modern day Saigon, with three lonely strangers forming a unique family, as a ten-year old orphan girl plays matchmaker to a zookeeper, and a beautiful flight attendant. This was a moving film, which won the Audience Award at the 2008 Los Angeles Film Festival. It was in Vietnamese, with English subtitles. I found it delightfully moody, romantic, and generally uplifting. There were some sad parts, as these three became closer and closer. I found myself crying a little several times, as I was touched by the emotions that flowed between these three separate characters. Here’s a trailer for the film.
It’s around 6pm Thursday evening as I begin typing out this last paragraph of today’s weather narrative…written from up here in Kula, Maui. We find more of those high cirrus clouds covering most of the islands this evening, which is streaky, rather than giving us a total overcast. The nature of this cirrus clouds are the kind that usually offers good colors as the sun goes down…and then perhaps again Friday morning with sunrise. The winds remained locally strong and gusty Thursday, as they have been most of this week so far. An example of the top gusts (mph) on each of the islands, as of 6pm:
33 – Kauai
36 – Oahu
32 – Molokai
36 – Lanai
43 – Kahoolawe
38 – Maui
35 – Big Island
I’m sipping on a nice glass of red wine from northern California as I continue to work on this last paragraph. This is a 2006 Guenoc Cabernet Sauvignon, which is very tasty. I gave my neighbor a glass, and he thought it was excellent as well. The label says: full of bright red cherry and cassis flavors, with a hint of dark chocolate…how could that combination be bad! I’m looking forward to sitting out on my weather deck in a little while, along with that glass, to take in what the weather serves up at sunset, I think it should be quite nice. I’ll be back early Friday morning with the next new weather narrative from paradise, and I hope that you have a great Thursday night, and that you will join me here again then! Aloha for now…Glenn.
Interesting: Fish caught near wastewater treatment plants serving five major U.S. cities had residues of pharmaceuticals in them, including medicines used to treat high cholesterol, allergies, high blood pressure, bipolar disorder and depression, researchers reported Wednesday. Findings from this first nationwide study of human drugs in fish tissue have prompted the Environmental Protection Agency to significantly expand similar ongoing research to more than 150 different locations.
"The average person hopefully will see this type of a study and see the importance of us thinking about water that we use every day, where does it come from, where does it go to? We need to understand this is a limited resource and we need to learn a lot more about our impacts on it," said study co-author Bryan Brooks, a Baylor University researcher and professor who has published more than a dozen studies related to pharmaceuticals in the environment.
A person would have to eat hundreds of thousands of fish dinners to get even a single therapeutic dose, Brooks said. But researchers including Brooks have found that even extremely diluted concentrations of pharmaceutical residues can harm fish, frogs and other aquatic species because of their constant exposure to contaminated water.
Interesting2: A newly laid, 32-mile underwater cable finally links the state’s only seafloor seismic station with the University of California, Berkeley’s seismic network, merging real-time data from west of the San Andreas fault with data from 31 other land stations sprinkled around Northern and Central California. Laying of the MARS (Monterey Accelerated Research System) fiber-optic cable was completed in 2007 by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) to power and collect data from a cluster of scientific instruments nearly 3,000 feet below the surface of Monterey Bay, 23 miles from the coastal town of Moss Landing.
A broadband seismometer that had been placed on the seafloor in 2002 was connected to the cable on Feb. 27, 2009, obviating the need to send a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) every three months to replace the battery and collect data. "Before, we had to wait three months to even know if the instruments were alive," said Barbara Romanowicz, director of the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory and a UC Berkeley professor of earth and planetary science.
Now, she said, "we can use the data from the seafloor station in real time together with those from the rest of the Berkeley Digital Seismic Network" to determine the location, magnitude and mechanism of offshore earthquakes, learn about the crust at the edge of the continental plate and understand better the hazards of the San Andreas fault system that runs north and south through the state.
According to Romanowicz, earthquake monitoring systems around the world have been trying to place seismometers on the seafloor for decades to cover the 71 percent of the Earth’s surface that is beneath the oceans. Islands have generally provided the only offshore data – the Berkeley network has one seismic station on the Farallon Islands – but these provide only spotty coverage.
Because the state’s main fault system, the San Andreas, runs along the Northern California coast, seafloor monitors are particularly critical. All but one station – the Farallon station – are east of the fault, making it hard to gain a comprehensive view of the fault system.
Interesting3: A brilliant green tree frog with huge black eyes, jumping spiders and a striped gecko are among more than 50 new animal species scientists have discovered in a remote, mountainous region of Papua New Guinea. The discoveries were announced Wednesday by Washington D.C.-based Conservation International, which spent the past several months analyzing more than 600 animal species the group found during its expedition to the South Pacific island nation in July and August.
Of the animals discovered, 50 spider species, three frogs and a gecko appear to have never been described in scientific literature before, the conservation group said. The new frogs include a tiny brown animal with a sharp chirp, a bug-eyed bright green tree frog and another frog with a loud ringing call. One of the jumping spiders is shiny and pale green, while another is furry and brown.
In a sharp reversal of Bush administration policies, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency said Tuesday that the agency planned an aggressive review of permit requests for mountaintop coal mining, citing serious concerns about potential harm to water quality.
The administrator, Lisa P. Jackson, said her agency had sent two letters to the Army Corps of Engineers on Monday in which it expressed concern about two proposed mining operations in West Virginia and Kentucky involving mountaintop removal, a form of strip mining that blasts the tops off mountains and dumps leftover rock in valleys, burying streams.
Interesting4: Red jasper cored from layers 3.46 billion years old suggests that not only did the oceans contain abundant oxygen then, but that the atmosphere was as oxygen rich as it is today, according to geologists. This jasper or hematite-rich chert formed in ways similar to the way this rock forms around hydrothermal vents in the deep oceans today. "Many people have assumed that the hematite in ancient rocks formed by the oxidation of siderite in the modern atmosphere," said Hiroshi Ohmoto, professor of geochemistry, Penn State.
"That is why we wanted to drill deeper, below the water table and recover un-weathered rocks." The researchers drilled diagonally into the base of a hill in the Pilbara Craton in northwest Western Australia to obtain samples of jasper that could not have been exposed to the atmosphere or water. These jaspers could be dated to 3.46 billion years ago. "Everyone agrees that this jasper is 3.46 billion years old," said Ohmoto.
"If hematite were formed by the oxidation of siderite at any time, the hematite would be found on the outside of the siderite, but it is found inside," he reported in a recent issue of Nature Geoscience. Interesting5: Maize was domesticated from its wild ancestor more than 8700 years according to biological evidence uncovered by researchers in the Mexico’s Central Balsas River Valley.
Interesting5: This is the earliest dated evidence — by 1200 years — for the presence and use of domesticated maize. According to Ranere, recent studies have confirmed that maize derived from teosinte, a large wild grass that has five species growing in Mexico, Guatemala and Nicaragua. The teosinte species that is closest to maize is Balsas teosinte, which is native to Mexico’s Central Balsas River Valley.
"We went to the area where the closest relative to maize grows, looked for the earliest maize and found it," said Ranere. "That wasn’t surprising since molecular biologists had determined that Balsas teosinte was the ancestral species to maize. So it made sense that this was where we would find the earliest domestication of maize."
The study began with Piperno, a Temple University anthropology alumna, finding evidence in the form of pollen and charcoal in lake sediments that forests were being cut down and burned in the Central Balsas River Valley to create agricultural plots by 7000 years ago. She also found maize and squash phytoliths — rigid microscopic bodies found in many plants — in lakeside sediments. Ranere, an archaeologist, joined in the study to find rock shelters or caves where people lived in that region thousands of years ago.
His team carried out excavations in four of the 15 caves and rock shelters visited in the region, but only one of them yielded evidence for the early domestication of maize and squash. Ranere excavated the site and recovered numerous grinding tools. Radiocarbon dating showed that the tools dated back at least 8700 years.
Although grinding tools were found beneath the 8700 year level, the researchers were not able to obtain a radiocarbon date for the earliest deposits. Previously, the earliest evidence for the cultivation of maize came from Ranere and Piperno’s earlier research in Panama where maize starch and phytoliths dated back 7600 years.
Interesting6: She may have ruled like a man, but Egyptian queen Hatshepsut still preferred to smell like a lady. The world may be able to get a whiff of that ancient royal scent when researchers complete their investigation into the perfume worn by Hatshepsut, the powerful pharaoh-queen who ruled over ancient Egypt for 20 years beginning around 1479 B.C. Analyzing a metal jar belonging to the famous queen , the team from the Bonn University Egyptian Museum in Germany recently found residue thought to be leftovers from Hatshepsut’s own perfume.
Their next step will be attempting to "reconstruct" the scent, which was likely made from pricey incense imported from present-day Somalia. Though funerary objects belonging to Egypt’s ancient rulers fill museums around the world, if successful, this will be the first time that a pharaoh’s perfume is recreated, the researchers said. Hatshepsut stepped in as one of ancient Egypt’s rare female leaders when her half-brother and husband, Pharaoh Thutmose II, died without an adult male heir.
She was meant to rule as a co-regent only until her stepson Thutmose III matured, but she effectively took the reins and was recognized as the pharaoh by the royal court and religious officials until her death in 1457 B.C., Egyptologists say. Despite her gender, Hatshepsut’s two decades as pharaoh are considered an incredibly successful time. Ruling like a man, historians say, she mounted at least one military campaign but kept Egypt largely peaceful, and commissioned several impressive building projects.
Hatshepsut is best known, perhaps, for reopening southern trade routes that had been interrupted by war, increasing the wealth of her empire. She famously launched a naval caravan to the ancient land of Punt — what today is called the Horn of Africa — bringing back ships laden with myrrh, frankincense and, notably, incense plants which were then replanted near her funerary temple (commonly under construction well before a pharaoh’s death), according to ancient documents.
"Incense was extremely valuable in ancient Egypt and was used only in temples and for living gods (such as the king)," said Michael Höveler-Müller, curator of the Bonn University Egyptian Museum. It is this incense that researchers suspect they have found in a filigree container bearing the queen’s name. Using powerful X-rays, the remains of a dried-out fluid were discovered at the bottom of the flacon. Pharmacologists will now analyze the residue and break it into its constituents, in the hopes of putting the scent back together, 3,500 years after Hatshepsut last wore it.
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