March 5-6, 2009
Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Thursday afternoon:
Lihue, Kauai – 74
Honolulu, Oahu – 80
Kaneohe, Oahu – 75
Kahului, Maui – 76
Hilo, Hawaii – 69
Kailua-kona – 77
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 – 78F
Hilo, Hawaii – 68
Haleakala Crater – 43 (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:
3.28 Mount Waialeale, Kauai
2.95 Oahu Forest NWR, Oahu
0.29 Molokai
0.01 Lanai
0.00 Kahoolawe
2.15 Puu Kukui, Maui
0.73 Pahoa, Big Island
Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a 1034 millibar high pressure system located far to the north of the islands. This high pressure system will keep our trade winds still locally gusty Friday, remaining at generally light to moderately strong levels into 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
Big Island Sea Cliffs
flickr.com
Our local trade winds will return to more normal speeds as we move through the rest of this work week…into the weekend and beyond. Looking at this latest weather map, we find a more normalized 1033 millibar high pressure system, in the area north of Hawaii Thursday evening. The winds being generated by this high pressure systrem, will keep a few of the wind related NWS advisories in place for the time being. These include the high surf advisory for surf breaking along our east facing beaches…and a marine weather statement for possible surges in the Kahului and Hilo harbors.
The trade winds will bring in lower level clouds, some with showers…while the upper winds will keep high and middle level clouds moving overhead as well. The bulk of whatever showers that fall, will end up along the windward sides, leaving the leeward sides generally dry. An area of low pressure aloft, edging closer to the islands Friday…will bring an increase in windward showers into the weekend. The leeward sides will remain generally dry, but may end up seeing a few showers towards the weekend too. The Big Island, which will be most directly underneath the cold air associated with the low pressure trough, will see the most generous showers.
The winds will remain on the strong and gusty side Thursday, although will finally begin to wind down some Friday into the weekend. The winds will generally be the lightest during the morning hours, which then often increase during the late morning through early evening hours. The following numbers represented the strongest gusts (mph) on each of the islands at around 6pm Thursday evening:
Kauai: 30
Oahu: 32
Molokai: 30
Maui: 36
Kahoolawe: 40
Lanai: 31
Big Island: 29
As you notice in the list of strongest gusts around the state Thursday afternoon…they are still all in the 30+ mph category. As the high pressure system to our north gradually loses more strength over the next couple of days, we should begin to see somewhat lighter trade winds blowing as we move into the upcoming weekend. The trade winds will remain active well into next week however, although gradually winding down into the moderately strong realms as we go forward.
Our local skies have been covered with high and middle level clouds, almost constantly during the last week…although there is relief in sight. If you have a chance to check out this looping satellite image, you’ll see that we still have lots of those persistent clouds moving overhead, which will keep us quite partly to mostly cloudy for the time being. There are expectations that by this weekend, they will have migrated eastward out of our area. At the same time, coming in on the trade winds, from the opposite direction, we have lower level clouds…which are carrying passing showers to the windward sides.
I’m writing from Kihei, Maui this evening, before driving a friend over to Kahului to pick up her car from the mechanics. As it has been all this week, the skies out there are totally cloudy as we head towards the sunset. There were actually some thin spots in the overcast during the afternoon, at which point I think I might have seen a few rays of sunshine trying their best to break through. Looking at that satellite image just up the page from here, it looks very likely that we’ll see more of this cloudiness coming our way on Friday. The warmest temperature at sea level today, was the barely 80F degree mark in the big city of Honolulu…actually the airport.
~~~ Cold air moving overhead soon, will be helping to add some new snow atop the tallest summits on the Big Island. Here’s the link for that high mountain, rising to near 14,000 foot…Mauna Kea. I’ve got to run right now, but will come back a little later this evening. Typically, I give the morning temperature here in Kula, at around 620am or so. This evening, it’s 620pm as I write these last words of the day. It’s 59.7F degrees, while this morning, as I recall, it was 47 degrees about 12 hours ago. As was the case this morning, it is still cloudy outside my weather tower. I’m going to go sit in one of my deck chairs for a while, and see what I can of the greatly muted sunset. I hope you have a great Thursday night, and that you will be so inclined to visit this website again on Friday! Aloha for now…Glenn
Interesting: Tiny creatures – growing rapidly on sea cage netting – cause serious problems for fish farmers. Tiny, pink and nasty: a plant-like midget from the animal kingdom has turned into an expensive neighbor for Norwegian fish farmers. “Wait a moment, and you’ll see how quickly nature can change,” says biologist Jana Günther. We are clambering together around a fish-farm sea-cage full of salmon.
In her orange insulated boiler suit the young German-born SINTEF scientist gets down on her knees and hauls on a rope. From the sea emerges a piece of greyish net – a sample of coarse netting of a sort often used in the “fences” that hold in the farmed salmon. From its meshes appears a forest of thin white threads that appear to end in pink pinheads.
“These are living creatures,” explains Günther. Ten years ago, they were not particularly interested in settling down at fish farms in Norwegian waters. Well, I can tell you that times have changed! My orange-clad companion explains that cultures of these little creatures are now growing rapidly on sea cage netting along much of the coast of Norway, and that this type of fouling has left the aquaculture industry with an expensive cleaning task.
“These tiny creatures have shown that if the nets are not cleaned often enough, they can cause serious problems in the course of a short time. In just a few weeks they can form carpets that almost choke the meshes and thus lower the water quality for the farmed fish,” says Günther.
Interesting2: For the first time, researchers have documented a shift in breeding ranges for northerly bird species in North America. The study parallels findings in Europe. Researchers at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF) have documented that a variety of North American bird species are extending their breeding ranges to the north, adding to concerns about climate change, according to a study published by the journal Global Change Biology. In a study published on the journal’s web site, the SUNY-ESF researchers state the change in the birds’ breeding ranges “provides compelling evidence that climate change is driving range shifts.”
“There are a wide spectrum of changes that are occurring and those changes are occurring in a relatively short amount of time. We’re not talking centuries, we’re talking decades,” said William Porter, an ESF faculty member and director of the college’s Adirondack Ecological Center, Porter worked on the study with Ph.D. student Benjamin Zuckerberg and AEC staff educator Annie M. Woods. “The most significant finding is that this is the first time in North America that we’re showing the repeating pattern that’s been shown before in Europe,” Woods said.
“It’s the first time we’ve been able to replicate those European findings, using the same kind of study. Focusing on 83 species of birds that have traditionally bred in New York state, the researchers compared data collected in the early 1980s with information gathered between 2000 and 2005. They discovered that many species had extended their range boundaries, some by as much as 40 miles.
“They are indeed moving northward in their range boundaries,” Zuckerberg said.“But the real signal came out with some of the northerly species that are more common in Canada and the northern part of the U.S. Their southern range boundaries are actually moving northward as well, at a much faster clip.”
Interesting3: The water levels in the Dead Sea – the deepest point on Earth – are dropping at an alarming rate with serious environmental consequences, according to Shahrazad Abu Ghazleh and colleagues from the University of Technology in Darmstadt, Germany. The projected Dead Sea-Red Sea or Mediterranean-Dead Sea Channels therefore need a significant carrying capacity to re-fill the Dead Sea to its former level, in order to sustainably generate electricity and produce freshwater by desalinization.
The study also shows that the drop in water levels is not the result of climate change; rather it is due to ever-increasing human water consumption in the area. Normally, the water levels of closed lakes such as the Dead Sea reflect climatic conditions – they are the result of the balance between water running into the lake from the tributary area and direct precipitation, minus water evaporation.
In the case of the Dead Sea, the change in water level is due to intensive human water consumption from the Jordan and Yarmouk Rivers for irrigation, as well as the use of Dead Sea water for the potash industry by both Israel and Jordan. Over the last 30 years, this water consumption has caused an accelerated decrease in water level.
Interesting4: From geckos and iguanas to Gila monsters and Komodo dragons, lizards are among the most common reptiles on Earth. They are found on every continent except Antarctica. One even pitches car insurance in TV ads. They seemingly can adapt to a variety of conditions, but are most abundant in the tropics. However, new research that builds on data collected more than three decades ago demonstrates that lizards living in tropical forests in Central and South America and the Caribbean could be in serious peril from rising temperatures associated with climate change.
In fact, those forest lizards appear to tolerate a much narrower range of survivable temperatures than do their relatives at higher latitudes and are actually less tolerant of high temperatures, said Raymond Huey, a University of Washington biology professor. "The least heat-tolerant lizards in the world are found at the lowest latitudes, in the tropical forests. I find that amazing," said Huey, lead author of a paper outlining climate warming’s threat to lizards published in the March 4 Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
The Royal Society is Great Britain’s national academy of science. It has often been assumed that tropical organisms are much better at dealing with high temperatures than those in colder climates because the lowland tropics are always warm. But that assumption is only true to a point, Huey said, because those in the tropical forest experience a much narrower range of temperatures during the year and are rarely, if ever, exposed to extreme high temperatures.
Interesting5: The Martian volcano Olympus Mons is about three times the height of Mount Everest, but it’s the small details that Rice University professors Patrick McGovern and Julia Morgan are looking at in thinking about whether the Red Planet ever had – or still supports – life. Using a computer modeling system to figure out how Olympus Mons came to be, McGovern and Morgan reached the surprising conclusion that pockets of ancient water may still be trapped under the mountain. Their research is published in February’s issue of the journal Geology. The scientists explained that their finding is more implication than revelation.
"What we were analyzing was the structure of Olympus Mons, why it’s shaped the way it is," said McGovern, an adjunct assistant professor of Earth science and staff scientist at the NASA-affiliated Lunar and Planetary Institute. "What we found has implications for life – but implications are what go at the end of a paper." Co-author Morgan is an associate professor of Earth science.
In modeling the formation of Olympus Mons with an algorithm known as particle dynamics simulation, McGovern and Morgan determined that only the presence of ancient clay sediments could account for the volcano’s asymmetric shape. The presence of sediment indicates water was or is involved.
Olympus Mons is tall, standing almost 15 miles high, and slopes gently from the foothills to the caldera, a distance of more than 150 miles. That shallow slope is a clue to what lies beneath, said the researchers. They suspect if they were able to stand on the northwest side of Olympus Mons and start digging, they’d eventually find clay sediment deposited there billions of years ago, before the mountain was even a molehill.
Interesting6: A Purdue University researcher has found a way to eliminate bacteria in packaged foods such as spinach and tomatoes, a process that could eliminate worries concerning some food-borne illnesses. Kevin Keener designed a device consisting of a set of high-voltage coils attached to a small transformer that generates a room-temperature plasma field inside a package, ionizing the gases inside.
The process kills harmful bacteria such as E. coli and salmonella, which have caused major public health concerns. Keener’s process is outlined in an article released online early in LWT – Food Science and Technology, a journal for the Swiss Society of Food and Technology and the International Union of Food Science and Technology.
"Conceptually, we can put any kind of packaged food we want in there," said Keener, an associate professor in the Department of Food Science. "So far, it has worked on spinach and tomatoes, but it could work on any type of produce or other food." By placing two high-voltage, low-watt coils on the outside of a sealed food package, a plasma field is formed. In the plasma field, which is a charged cloud of gas, oxygen has been ionized and turned into ozone.
Treatment times range from 30 seconds to about five minutes, Keener said. Ozone kills bacteria such as E. coli and salmonella. The longer the gas in the package remains ionized, the more bacteria that are killed. Eventually, the ionized gas will revert back to its original composition. The process uses only 30-40 watts of electricity, less than most incandescent light bulbs. The outside of the container only increases a few degrees in temperature, so its contents are not cooked or otherwise altered.
Interesting7: A growing body of evidence, including analyses from military experts in the United States and Europe, supports the estimate that by midcentury, climate change will make vast parts of Africa and Asia uninhabitable. Analysts say it could trigger a migration the size of which the world has never before seen. Some of the big questions remain unanswered: How many people will really move? Where will they go? How will they go? Will they return?
But experts estimate that as many as 250 million people — a population almost that of the entire United States — could be on the move by 2050. They will go because temperatures are rising and desertification has set in where rainfall is needed most. They will go because more potent monsoons are making flood-prone areas worse. They will go because of other water events caused by melting glaciers, rising seas and the slow and deadly seepage of saline water into their wells and fields.
The worst migration cases will be nations like the Maldives and small islands in the Pacific. Their inhabitants will go because their homelands will likely sink beneath the rising sea. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a minimum of 207 million people in Latin America, Asia and Africa will not have enough water inside a decade. In Asia, an extra 130 million people will be at risk of hunger by the middle of the century. By 2100, crop revenues in Africa will drop 90 percent. And scientists see Bangladesh as ground zero.
The country’s 150 million inhabitants live in the delta of three waterways about the size of Iowa, and the majority of the country sits less than 20 feet above sea level. According to the IPCC, rising sea levels will wipe out more cultivated land in Bangladesh than anywhere in the world. By 2050, rice production is expected to drop 10 percent and wheat production by 30 percent. By the end of the century, more than a quarter of the country will be inundated. About 15 million people in Bangladesh alone could be displaced. That’s the equivalent of every person in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.
Interesting8: People and horses have trekked together through at least 5,500 years of history, according to an international team of researchers reporting in Friday’s edition of the journal Science. New evidence, corralled in Kazakhstan, indicates the Botai culture used horses as beasts of burden _ and as a source of meat and milk _ about 1,000 years earlier than had been widely believed, according to the team led by Alan Outram of England’s University of Exeter.
"This is significant because it changes our understanding of how these early societies developed," Outram said. Domestication of the horse was an immense breakthrough _ bringing advancements in communications, transportation, farming and warfare. The research also shows the development of animal domestication and a fully pastoral economy may well be independent of famous centers of domestication, such as the Near East and China, Outram added.
Compared to dogs, domesticated as much as 15,000 years ago, and such food animals as sheep, goats and pigs, horses are relatively late arrivals in the human relationship. "It is not so much the domestication of the horse that is important, but the invention of horseback riding," commented anthropologist David W. Anthony of Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y. "When people began to ride, it revolutionized human transport."
Email Glenn James: 
