March 3-4, 2009
Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Tuesday afternoon:
Lihue, Kauai – 73
Honolulu, Oahu – 76
Kaneohe, Oahu – 73
Kahului, Maui – 75
Hilo, Hawaii – 76
Kailua-kona – 80
Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level – and on the highest mountains…at 4 p.m. Tuesday afternoon:
Barking Sands, Kauai – 78F
Molokai airport – 70
Haleakala Crater – 45 (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 36 (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 Tuesday afternoon:
0.45 Mount Waialeale, Kauai
1.11 Manoa Valley, Oahu
0.10 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.01 Kahoolawe
1.55 Puu Kukui, Maui
0.30 Glenwood, 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 Wednesday into 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
Aloha from the Hawaiian Islands!
Winds that last this long, and blow this strongly…slow down very gradually! Looking at this latest weather map, we find the long lasting 1037 millibar high pressure system, in the area north-northwest of Hawaii Tuesday night. The winds being generated by this high pressure systrem, will keep all of the wind related NWS advisories in place into Wednesday. 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 remains active in the area around Kahoolawe, and around some parts of the Big Island. In addition, the gale warning remains alive between Maui and Molokai, and between Maui and the Big Island…and the southeast waters of the Big Island.
The copious high cirrus clouds are making for cloudy skies above, while the incoming lower clouds, carried by the gusty trade winds…are keeping the windward sides a little wet at times. The atmosphere remains fairly dry and stable late in the day Tuesday, limiting the showers…at least in intensity. As the winds have turned more easterly now, they will begin to bring more shower bearing clouds our way with time. An area of low pressure aloft, which will edge closer to the islands starting around Thursday…will bring that expected increase in windward showers. The leeward sides will remain generally dry, although off and on filled with those sun dimming high cirrus clouds through the rest of this week.
We’re almost through the last of the very windy weather that we’ve had blowing for the last week…which will finally return back into moderately strong realms later Thursday into Friday. 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 Tuesday evening:
Kauai: 31
Oahu: 35
Molokai: 35
Maui: 40
Kahoolawe: 43
Lanai: 35
Big Island: 38
It’s early Tuesday evening as I begin writing this last section of today’s weather narrative. As you see from the wind gust numbers above, we’re still involved in this windy episode. As the high pressure system to our NNW gradually loses some strength over the next couple of days, we should begin to see somewhat lighter trade winds blowing by say Friday. These winds aren’t going to stop dead in their tracks anytime in the near future…that’s for sure! As a matter of fact, the trade winds will remain active well into next week, gradually winding down into the moderately strong realms.
The windward sides have had passing showers, and will have more of them during the second half of the week. This will be due to the higher moisture content of the winds, now coming in from more of an easterly direction. If you have a chance to check out this looping satellite image, you’ll see we still have lots of those persistent high cirrus clouds out to our west, which continue to stream our way. These icy clouds way up there, are being carried overhead on the upper winds aloft. At the same time, coming in on the still gusty trade winds, from the opposite direction, we have lower level clouds…which are carrying light passing showers to the windward sides.
~~~ I’m about ready to leave Kihei, Maui, for the drive home to Kula. Looking out the window here, it’s mostly cloudy…what else is new! The winds are lighter for a change, which seems like a good thing. The strong winds are still blowing locally though, with the strongest gust of 43 mph, which is pretty darn fast paced, occurring at the small island of Kahoolawe. If you had a chance to glance at that looping satellite image in the paragraph above, you saw all those rather thick high clouds filling our local skies. Meanwhile, all sea level locations today remained in the somewhat cool 70F’s, with Honolulu being the exception…where it hit 80 degrees. What can I say? I suppose I could simply say…hang in there folks, we will have sunshine again, and light winds too! I’ll be back very early Wednesday morning with your next new weather narrative, I hope you have a great Tuesday night from wherever you happen to be reading from! Aloha for now…Glenn.
By the way: Today is Girl’s Day…so Happy Girl’s Day all you lovely Gals!
Interesting: Though a fraction of Chicago’s size, this industrial city in southeast Sweden, has plenty of similarities with it, including a long, snowy winter, and a football team the town’s crazy about. One thing is dramatically different about Kalmar, however: It is on the verge of eliminating the use of fossil fuels, for good, and with minimal effect on its standard of living. The city of 60,000—and its surrounding 12-town region, with a quarter-million people—has traded in most of its oil, gas and electric furnaces for community "district heat," produced at plants that burn sawdust and wood waste left by timber companies.
Hydropower, nuclear power and windmills now provide more than 90 percent of the region’s electricity. Kalmar’s publicly owned cars and buses—and a growing share of its private and business vehicles—run on biogas made from waste wood and chicken manure, or an 85 percent ethanol blend from Brazil. Just as important, the switch from oil and gas is helping slash fuel bills and preserve jobs in a worldwide economic downturn. And despite dramatic drops in fossil fuel consumption, residents say nobody has been forced to give up the car or huddle around the dining table wearing three sweaters to stay warm.
Interesting2: The scourge of nitrogen pollution in China could be prevented by more efficient use of nitrogen fertilizer in farming — without compromising crop yields, researchers have found. Farmers in China often practice ‘double-cropping’, where a second crop of food is planted in the same field after the first crop has been harvested. This has allowed the country to achieve food self-sufficiency but the excessive use of nitrogen fertilizer, applied to each crop, can lead to environmental problems including the pollution of groundwater with nitrates, greenhouse gas emissions and other forms of air pollution — as well as harming the health of humans and ecosystems.
Because over-fertilizing provides crops with more nitrogen than they need, up to twice as much is lost to the environment than with optimum methods, via different processes depending on the crop. In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last week, researchers compared common fertilization techniques with optimum techniques in two of the most intensive double-cropping systems in China: rice/wheat in the Taihu region of east China and wheat/maize on the North China Plain. They found that average fertilizer use — around 600 kilograms per hectare — can be cut by 30—60 per cent, with farmers retaining the same yields.
By efficiently recycling manures and crop residues, and rotating crops with nitrogen-producing leguminous plants, it is possible to reduce reliance on synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, the researchers write. The use of synthetic fertilizer has been actively promoted by scientists since the 1980s, and nitrogen fertilizer use has increased from seven million to 26 million tons today. Ju Xiaotang, a professor at the College of Resources and Environmental Sciences at the China Agricultural University in Beijing and lead author of the research, suggests that the government educate farmers to avoid over-fertilization and environmental degradation.
Zhang Shuqing, a researcher at the Institute of Agricultural Resources and Regional Planning at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, said that farmers tend to use more fertilizer than necessary because they worry the crops will have insufficient nutrients. "Balanced application of nitrogen, phosphate, potassium and micronutrient fertilizer will help reduce the pollution while maintaining a good effect on crop yield," says Zhang.
Interesting3: To avoid creating greenhouse gases, it makes more sense using today’s technology to leave land unfarmed in conservation reserves than to plow it up for corn to make biofuel, according to a comprehensive Duke University-led study. "Converting set-asides to corn-ethanol production is an inefficient and expensive greenhouse gas mitigation policy that should not be encouraged until ethanol-production technologies improve," the study’s authors reported in the March edition of the research journal Ecological Applications. Nevertheless, farmers and producers are already receiving federal subsidies to grow more corn for ethanol under the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007.
"One of our take-home messages is that conservation programs are currently a cheaper and more efficient greenhouse gas policy for taxpayers than corn-ethanol production," said biologist Robert Jackson, the Nicholas Professor of Global Environmental Change at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment, who led the study. Making ethanol from corn reduces atmospheric releases of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide because the CO2 emitted when the ethanol burns is "canceled out" by the carbon dioxide taken in by the next crop of growing plants, which use it in photosynthesis. That means equivalent amounts of carbon dioxide are removed from the atmosphere and "fixed" into plant tissues.
But the study notes that some CO2 not counterbalanced by plant carbon uptake gets released when corn is grown and processed for ethanol. Furthermore, ethanol contains only about 70 percent of gasoline’s energy. "So we actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions only 20 percent when we substitute one liter of ethanol for one liter of gasoline," said Gervasio Piñeiro, the study’s first author, who is a Buenos Aires, Argentina-based scientist and postdoctoral research associate in Jackson’s Duke laboratory.
Interesting4: You may not have come across the Bewick’s swan. The smallest swan found in Britain, it reaches our shores from its Siberian breeding grounds in October and, along with 65,000 other water birds, it splashes down in the wetlands of the Severn Estuary. It is, without doubt, very cute. But soon, it will have to find somewhere else to feed. In a few years’ time, hundreds of lorries and cranes are set to sling 10 miles of steel and concrete across the most beautiful and ecologically diverse of estuaries, flooding the swans’ habitat. Could anything be more of an affront to the eco-minded? The call would seem to be as clear as they come: save the swans, say no to construction.
But it isn’t that simple. All that steel and concrete will become the Severn Barrage which, by harnessing the tides, would provide 5 per cent of Britain’s electricity, with no nasty carbon emissions. So, which to choose: clean electricity, or the protection of birds and beasts? It’s a tough call, but one we may have to get used to. Last year, the EU set a target for the UK to increase the proportion of its energy gained from renewable sources such as wind, water and the sun from 1.8 per cent to 15 per cent — in 12 years. The House of Lords’ European committee called the target "extremely challenging". Others call it unachievable. Either way, the Government is forced to seek more options than a few offshore wind turbines— and there’s going to be some serious cute collateral along the way.
Interesting5: Washington will become only the second US state to allow assisted suicide as its new "death with dignity" law takes effect. Under a ballot measure passed during November elections, physicians in the northwest state will be allowed to write prescriptions for lethal doses of drugs for terminally ill patients who have less than six months to live. Only one other US state – Oregon – has similar legislation, although a court in Montana recently ruled that terminally ill patients had the right to seek physician-assisted suicide. Supporters of the new Washington legislation, made possible by a 2006 US Supreme Court ruling, say the law allows for "aided dying" rather than assisted suicide or euthanasia.
"Aided dying is neither euthanasia nor suicide," said Terry Barnett, president of the Washington branch of Compassion & Choices advocacy group. "It’s not euthanasia because euthanasia implies action by a physician to end a patient’s life. It’s not suicide because people who choose aid in dying are not choosing to end their lives. "They don’t want to die – they’re choosing to end suffering that cannot be relieved and suffering that they are experiencing that is worse than death." Supporters of the law say a string of stringent checks and balances have been put in place to prevent the system being abused, rejecting critics who argue the law will make it easy for sufferers to choose to die.
Interesting6: Japanese car maker Toyota has leased a cargo ship to store 2500 unsold cars at the Swedish port of Malmoe, where parking lots are already full due to plunging car sales, a port official said today. "The Swedish-Norwegian company Wallenius Wilhelmsen has reached an agreement with Toyota to let them use the Morning Glory cargo ship to store some cars, and we load and unload the cars," Bart Steijaert, in charge of car stocks at the Malmoe harbour, said. More than 30,000 cars of all brands are currently piling up in the port, including the 2500 on board the 195-metre Morning Glory. The port has a maximum capacity of around 27,500 cars, Mr Steijaert said.
A new parking lot is being built at the port to provide more space for cars and is due to be completed in April. "Since last summer, we’ve had a lot of cars in the harbour and we started to lack parking areas as the car sales dropped dramatically, and then the vessel arrived on January 7," Mr Steijaert said. Car sales have come to a screeching halt around the world since the global economic crisis erupted late last year, leading to an overload of stocks. In Sweden, only 14,603 cars were sold in February, a drop of 31.3 per cent from the same month a year earlier, statistics showed.
Interesting7: A region of Earth so barren and desolate that it’s often compared to Mars is home to simple but thriving ecosystems, suggesting that life could indeed survive on the Red Planet. "If you have just a few basic things," said University of Colorado at Boulder microbiologist Steven Schmidt, "you can get a complex ecosystem going, even in one of the harshest places on the planet." Schmidt’s team studied soil from the upper flanks of the Socompa volcano, high in the Andes mountains. Straddling Chile and Argentina, the volcano is surrounded by the Atacama desert, one of the few spots on Earth to contain regions devoid of any life form.
At 20,000 feet above sea level, the Socompa’s upper flanks are especially harsh: there’s little oxygen, and ultraviolet radiation passes easily through the thin atmosphere. But where steam from the volcano bursts through the ground, there’s methane and water. Add that to atmospheric carbon dioxide, and conditions resemble what once existed — and may still exist — on Mars. Scientists recently found that Mars still belches methane into its carbon-dioxide rich atmosphere. And though NASA’s Mars Rover found water only in ice, rather than the liquid necessary for life as we know it, many geologists suspect water is present beneath the planet’s surface, warmed by the Mars’ still-hot core.
"The Socompa microbial ecosystem is an extremely exciting Earth analog for investing how life on Mars may survive in hydrothermal oases, where water, heat and nutrients are being provided from deep within," said California Institute of Technology biochemist Adrian Ponce, who was not involved in the study. Schmidt’s team sampled soil around volcanic vents, and from regional soils thought to be lifeless. In the vent soil, they identified moss, algae and about 500 species of bacteria. Apart from the discovery of a new species of mite, said Schmidt, these findings are most significant for their level of genomic detail, since the organisms were already known to exist. Far more surprising was the presence of roughly 100 species of bacteria in earth taken miles from volcano’s vents.
No life at all was thought to exist in that parched soil. "That’s the more Mars-like soil," said Schmidt. "There’s definitely a microbial community there." According to study co-author Elizabeth Costello, a University of Colorado at Boulder biologist, the bacteria "may stay in a dormant state until a snowfall occurs and water is provided to them." This, she said, might occur "fairly rarely" — an understatement for a region in which years can pass between rainstorms. "We have no idea what they’re doing or how they’re living," said Schmidt, who plans to further study the unlikely bugs.
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