April 13-14, 2009
Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Monday afternoon:
Lihue, Kauai – 75
Honolulu, Oahu – 82
Kaneohe, Oahu – 76
Kahului, Maui – 78
Hilo, Hawaii – 74
Kailua-kona – 80
Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level – and on the highest mountains…at 5 p.m. Monday evening:
Port Allen, Kauai – 81F
Hilo, Hawaii – 72
Haleakala Crater – 48 (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 41 (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:
0.65 Mount Waialaele, Kauai
0.23 South Fork Kaukonahua, Oahu
0.04 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.03 Kahoolawe
1.99 Puu Kukui, Maui
1.14 Glenwood, Big Island
Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a 1034 millibar high pressure system located far to the northeast of the islands. This far away high pressure cell will have our trade winds blowing in the moderately strong category into 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
Hawaii has some of the best golf…and surfing
Trade winds will remain breezy Monday night through Wednesday, then considerably lighter Thursday and Friday…with returning light trade winds by Saturday or Sunday. The winds are strong enough Monday evening, that the NWS is keeping small craft wind advisories in those windiest areas around Maui and the
Clear to partly cloudy skies will prevail, with only the
It’s early Monday evening, as I begin writing this last section of today’s weather narrative. Monday was a nice day here in the islands, with the trade winds blowing, just a few light showers…and lots of sunshine. The high clouds were around, but mostly just over Maui and the Big Island of Hawaii. Looking at this looping satellite image, we see that these icy clouds are edging eastward, and should clear the Big island at some point Tuesday. As this looping radar image shows however, there is a very limited amount of shower activity. ~~~ As noted in the paragraphs above, our weather will be filled with breezy trade winds through mid-week, which will then slack off Thursday through early Saturday. They should pick up at some point later Saturday or by Sunday. It appears that our local showers, whether over the windward sides, or the mountains during the afternoons on Thursday and Friday…will all be generally on the light side. ~~~ Looking out the window here in Kihei, before I take the drive back upcountry to Kula, our skies are still filled with those pesky high cirrus clouds. They may be thin enough however, that we could see a nice sunset…which I’ll be watching for myself from home. I’ll be back online again early Tuesday morning, I hope to meet you here again then! Aloha for now…Glenn.
Interesting: Japan’s whaling catch in its latest Antarctic hunt fell far short of its target after disruptions by anti-whaling activists, the Fisheries Agency said on Monday. Japan, which considers whaling to be a cherished cultural tradition, killed 679 Minke whales despite plans to catch around 850. It caught just one fin whale compared with a target of 50 in the hunt that began in November. Some ships in its six-ship fleet have returned home after clashes with the hard line group Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, including a collision that crushed a railing on one of the Japanese ships.
A Fisheries Agency official said ships could not carry out whaling for a total of 16 days because of bad weather and skirmishes with the activists. Japan officially stopped commercial whaling after agreeing to a global moratorium in 1986, but began what it calls a scientific research whaling program the following year. Whale meat can be found in some supermarkets and restaurants. The agency has declined to comment on a recent report that Japan is considering reducing the number of whales it catches each year. Japan has a moratorium on catching humpback whales, a favorite with whale watchers, after international criticism.
Interesting2: In our increasingly urbanized world, it turns out that a little green can go a long way toward improving our health, not just that of the planet. That could mean something as simple as a walk in the park or just a tree viewed through a window. It’s not necessarily the exercise that is the key. It’s the refreshing contact with nature and its uncomplicated demands on us.
Here is how it works: Modern life — commuting, computing, paying taxes — can place a burden on our brains and bodies. In recent years, scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Landscape and Human Health Laboratory and elsewhere have compiled evidence that suggests that a connection to nature is vital to our psychological and physical health because it helps recharge our brains so that we’re better able to cope with the stresses in life.
This ingrained dependence on our environment is like that of any other animal it seems, because like other organisms, we evolved to thrive in our natural surroundings, said Frances (Ming) Kuo, director of the laboratory. Kuo’s colleague William Sullivan discussed this topic earlier this month at a symposium, "Exploring the Dynamic Relationship Between Health and the Environment," at the American Museum of Natural History here.
Interesting3: Researchers at North Carolina State University have found that a tiny aquatic plant can be used to clean up animal waste at industrial hog farms and potentially be part of the answer for the global energy crisis. Their research shows that growing duckweed on hog wastewater can produce five to six times more starch per acre than corn, according to researcher Dr. Jay Cheng.
This means that ethanol production using duckweed could be "faster and cheaper than from corn," says fellow researcher Dr. Anne-Marie Stomp. "We can kill two birds – biofuel production and wastewater treatment – with one stone – duckweed," Cheng says. Starch from duckweed can be readily converted into ethanol using the same facilities currently used for corn, Cheng adds.
Corn is currently the primary crop used for ethanol production in the United States. However, its use has come under fire in recent years because of concerns about the amount of energy used to grow corn and commodity price disruptions resulting from competition for corn between ethanol manufacturers and the food and feed industries.
Duckweed presents an attractive, non-food alternative that has the potential to produce significantly more ethanol feedstock per acre than corn; exploit existing corn-based ethanol production processes for faster scale-up; and turn pollutants into a fuel production system.
The duckweed system consists of shallow ponds that can be built on land unsuitable for conventional crops, and is so efficient it generates water clean enough for re-use. The technology can utilize any nutrient-rich wastewater, from livestock production to municipal wastewater.
Large-scale hog farms manage their animal waste by storing it in large "lagoons" for biological treatment. Duckweed utilizes the nutrients in the wastewater for growth, thus capturing these nutrients and preventing their release into the environment. In other words, Cheng says, "Duckweed could be an environmentally friendly, economically viable feedstock for ethanol."
Interesting4: Since Congress lifted a moratorium on offshore drilling last year, federal lawmakers have grappled with the issue of how best to regulate U.S. ocean waters to allow oil, wave and wind energy development, while sustainably managing critical fisheries and marine animal habitats. A new policy paper, published April 10 in Science by a team of Duke University experts, argues that establishing a public trust doctrine for federal waters could be an effective and ethical solution to this and similar conflicts.
"The public trust doctrine could provide a practical legal framework for restructuring the way we regulate and manage our oceans. It would support ocean-based commerce while protecting marine species and habitats," says lead author Mary Turnipseed, a PhD student at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. The public trust doctrine is "a simple but powerful legal concept," Turnipseed says, that obliges governments to manage certain natural resources in the best interests of their citizens, without sacrificing the needs of future generations.
Interesting5: German companies said they are to order four new high-technology ships which will be able to lower stilts 50 meters to the seabed and jack themselves up. Cranes on the vessels may need only about a week to assemble an offshore wind turbine, according to details from civil-engineering company Hochtief in Bremen. The windmills will be built on concrete artificial islands.
The new fleet, operated jointly with the Beluga shipping company of Bremen, would be able to erect 160 wind turbines a year. Hochtief already operates such a ship, the 4-year-old Odin, which has been contracted to put in place a 45-metre high foundation for a transformer in the middle of the Alpha Ventus wind farm in German coastal waters of the North Sea.
A Beluga spokeswoman said a contract would be signed next week to spend 800 million euros (1.07 billion dollars) on the new-technology ships, with all four to be in operation by 2012. Each will have four stilts and will take all the components out to the watery building sites and accommodate all the workers. Beluga chief executive Niels Stolberg told the newspaper Weser Kurier that no competitor in the world would offer as much. A Hochtief executive, Martin Rahtge, said there were currently fewer than 10 ships in the world with this capability.
Interesting6: Four Austrian glaciers have increased in size in 2008, but the Austrian Alpine Club warned that this was no sign of a new trend, as the majority of glaciers continued to melt in 2008. "The last time we had a larger number of growing glaciers was in 1997," the Alpine Club’s lead researcher Gernot Patzelt said. However, the group’s latest study found that 83 of 94 monitored glaciers continued to melt by up to 49 meters, as temperatures lay above long-term averages by 0.4 degrees in winter and 0.9 degrees in summer.
On average, Austria’s glaciers shrank by 12.8 meters in length, more than one meter below the 10-year average. The below-average decrease was due to the fact that large ends of several glaciers- called glacier tongues – had disintegrated in previous years, and that there were no such developments last year. In recent years, some glaciers in Austria and Germany have been covered with protective textiles in summer to prevent them from shrinking even further.
Interesting7: NASA satellite data and a new modeling approach could improve weather forecasting and save more lives when future cyclones develop. About 15 percent of the world’s tropical cyclones occur in the northern Indian Ocean, but because of high population densities along low-lying coastlines, the storms have caused nearly 80 percent of cyclone-related deaths around the world. Incomplete atmospheric data for the Bay of Bengal and Arabian Sea make it difficult for regional forecasters to provide enough warning for mass evacuations.
In the wake of last year’s Cyclone Nargis — one of the most catastrophic cyclones on record — a team of NASA researchers re-examined the storm as a test case for a new data integration and mathematical modeling approach. They compiled satellite data from the days leading up to the May 2 landfall of the storm and successfully "hindcasted" Nargis’ path and landfall in Burma.
"Hindcasting" means that the modelers plotted the precise course of the storm. In addition, the retrospective results showed how forecasters might now be able to produce multi-day advance warnings in the Indian Ocean and improve advance forecasts in other parts of the world. Results from their study were published March 26 in Geophysical Research Letters.
"There is no event in nature that causes a greater loss of life than Northern Indian Ocean cyclones, so we have a strong motivation to improve advance warnings," said the study’s lead author, Oreste Reale, an atmospheric modeler with the Goddard Earth Sciences and Technology Center, a partnership between NASA and the University of Maryland-Baltimore County.
In late April 2008, weather forecasters tracking cyclone Nargis initially predicted the storm would make landfall in Bangladesh. But the storm veered unexpectedly to the east and intensified from a category 1 storm to a category 4 in just 24 hours. When it made landfall in Burma (Myanmar) on May 2, the storm and its surge killed more than 135,000 people, displaced tens of thousands, and destroyed about $12 billion in property.
In the months that followed, Reale and his U.S.-based team tested the NASA-created Data Assimilation and Forecasting System known as GEOS-5 and its NASA/NOAA-created analysis technique using data from the days leading up to Nargis because the storm was particularly fatal and highly characteristic of cyclones in the northern Indian Ocean.
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