April 21-22, 2009
Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Tuesday afternoon:
Lihue, Kauai – 72
Honolulu, Oahu – 79
Kaneohe, Oahu – 73
Kahului, Maui – 74
Hilo, Hawaii – 73
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:
Kailua-kona – 79F
Princeville, Kauai – 70
Haleakala Crater – 41 (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – missing (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:
1.41 Hanalei River, Kauai
5.18 Olomana Fire Station, Oahu
1.11 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.00 Kahoolawe
3.84 Kahakuloa, Maui
2.51 Honokaa, Big Island
Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a low pressure system to the north-northeast of Hawaii, with its associated weakening cold front now to the east of the Big Island Wednesday. There’s a ridge of high pressure several hundred miles to the north of the islands, which will keep light trade winds over us for the time being.
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
Just the way we like it…
A weakening cold front is located over the Big Island Tuesday evening, which will have the bulk of the showers…falling in Hawaii overnight.
Rainfall, at least almost all of the heavy stuff, has tapered off now. This looping radar image shows where the showers are falling as we move into Tuesday night. There are no precipitation related advisories in force anywhere in the Aloha state at the time of this writing. As noted below, the next chance for more widespread showers will hold off until later Thursday or Friday.
Skies are still quite cloudy in the islands later in the day Tuesday, consisting of a mix of high and low level types. There are some showers falling, especially along the windward sides, and those around the Big Island…but will generally be quite light in most cases. As this looping satellite image shows,
the clouds, at least the high and middle level clouds, are moving eastward. As shown, they have already cleared Kauai, and will be east of Oahu soon. The trade winds will carry a few clouds and showers our way, going into Wednesday.
Looking a bit further ahead into the week, and especially starting later Thursday into Saturday…we may see another round of locally heavy rains arriving. The computer models have been showing a low pressure system forming to the west of the islands by Thursday night. If this happens as expected by the models, we could see a serious precipitation event. The NWS has issued what they call a hydrologic outlook statement, which calls for "HEAVY RAINS AND FLASH FLOODING POSSIBLE FROM LATE THURSDAY THROUGH SATURDAY." There’s still quite a large question as to the specifics at this point, so it might be best to
wait until Wednesday rolls around before we get too overly worried about this wet weather scenario.
It’s early Tuesday evening as I begin writing this last section of today’s weather narrati ve. The past 24 hours have been cloudy, along with localized heavy showers on most of the islands. There were reports of 3.00 to 5.00+ inch precipitation totals in those wettest areas. Those rains have ended for the most part, as the cold front which brought them, dissipates over the northern part of the Big island. Early Tuesday evening we still have the high wind warning atop the summits on the Big island, and a localized small craft wind advisory around Maui County…including the Alenuihaha Channel between Maui and the Big Island. ~~~ Looking out the window here in Kihei before I leave for the drive back upcountry to Kula, it’s quite cloudy…with slightly cool northerly breezes blowing. There is some filtered sunshine, as we begin to see some thinning of the cirrus deck, which should make for a nice sunset! Wednesday should be a pretty nice day, with much sunnier skies…as the trade winds make an appearance in our Hawaiian Island weather picture again. ~~~ It will be interesting to see what the computer models show on Wednesday, about the possibility of wet weather moving over us again ater Thursday into Saturday. I’m not personally so absolutely sure that we will see all that much rainfall, but it could still happen. Let’s check it out again Wednesday, when I’ll be back early in the morning with more information about all this. I hope you have a great Tuesday night until then! Aloha for now…Glenn.
Interesting: Climate change will make the day longer by the end of the century, according to a new study. Earth’s atmosphere plays a large role in controlling how fast the planet rotates. As the seasons change, variations in high-level jets of wind shift, adding and subtracting about a millisecond to our day each year. Elfrun Lehmann of the Free University of Berlin in Germany and a group of researchers compared wind patterns measured between 1982 and 2000 to a computer model that projected conditions from 2071 to 2100.
They found that Earth’s days will lengthen by an average of millisecond in the future if carbon dioxide doubles compared to preindustrial levels, thanks mostly to increasingly warm "El Nino" conditions in the tropical Pacific Ocean. "After 2050 you get more strong El Ninos," Lehmann said. "El Ninos lead to extensive increase in jets in the upper troposphere." Lehmann presented his research in a meeting this week of the European Geosciences Union.
Interesting2: A severe drought gripping Texas is causing unusually salty conditions along the Gulf Coast, upsetting the region’s ecological balance and threatening coastal wildlife including oysters, crabs and whooping cranes, the most endangered crane species. The drought is one of the driest on record for Texas and is currently the worst in the U.S., which has seen persistent dry weather across several Western states, Florida and even Hawaii, according to academic and government monitors.
The scarcity of rain has reduced fresh-water flow from rivers and streams into coastal marshes, estuaries and bays that normally dilute the salt content of water from the Gulf of Mexico. This spring, the only migrating whooping-crane flock that exists in the wild lost 23 of its 270 members to hunger and disease brought on by the dry weather, said Tom Stehn, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service whooping-crane coordinator. That is a big blow to conservation programs that have worked over the past 50 years to slowly increase the number of cranes.
Interesting3: Scientists at Harvard University have found that tropical cyclones readily inject ice far into the stratosphere, possibly feeding global warming. The finding, published in Geophysical Research Letters, provides more evidence of the intertwining of severe weather and global warming by demonstrating a mechanism by which storms could drive climate change. Many scientists now believe that global warming, in turn, is likely to increase the severity of tropical cyclones.
"Since water vapor is an important greenhouse gas, an increase of water vapor in the stratosphere would warm the Earth’s surface," says David M. Romps, a research associate in Harvard’s Department of Earth and Planetary Science. "Our finding that tropical cyclones are responsible for many of the clouds in the stratosphere opens up the possibility that these storms could affect global climate, in addition to the oft-mentioned possibility of climate change affecting the frequency and intensity of tropical cyclones."
Romps and co-author Zhiming Kuang, assistant professor of climate science in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, were intrigued by earlier data suggesting that the amount of water vapor in the stratosphere has grown by roughly 50 percent over the past 50 years. Scientists are currently unsure why this increase has occurred; the Harvard researchers sought to examine the possibility that tropical cyclones might have contributed by sending a large fraction of their clouds into the stratosphere.
Using infrared satellite data gathered from 1983 to 2006, Romps and Kuang analyzed towering cloud tops associated with thousands of tropical cyclones, many of them near the Philippines, Mexico, and Central America. Their analysis demonstrated that in a cyclone, narrow plumes of miles-tall storm clouds can rise so explosively through the atmosphere that they often push into the stratosphere.
Romps and Kuang found that tropical cyclones are twice as likely as other storms to punch into the normally cloud-free stratosphere, and four times as likely to inject ice deep into the stratosphere. "It is … widely believed that global warming will lead to changes in the frequency and intensity of tropical cyclones," Romps and Kuang write in Geophysical Research Letters. "Therefore, the results presented here establish the possibility for a feedback between tropical cyclones and global climate."
Interesting4: A UK study into children’s happiness and safety co-authored by a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire just released has revealed that only 11 per cent of children surveyed are carefree and free from worry. Professor Karen Pine, Research Leader at the University of Hertfordshire’s School of Psychology worked with Intuitive Media Research Services to conduct research among 200,000 UK children aged 6-14 years and over 18,000 of their teachers in their social learning networks.
The study, entitled Happy and Safe, which asked children how safe and happy they felt and what the Government could do to make their lives better, revealed that although 82 per cent of children said that they felt happy most of the time, with girls a little happier than boys and younger children happier than older ones, only 11 per cent are completely carefree and free from worry.
Over half of those surveyed (51 per cent) worried about their parents divorcing or arguing, with over half also worrying about violence and street crime. It also emerged that 72 per cent of those surveyed cited boredom as the cause of their unhappiness – more so for girls (68 per cent) than for boys (58 per cent). “Children’s well being should be the top concern of any society, and a good measure of well being is how safe children feel and how happy and fulfilled they feel,” said Professor Pine.
“I find it surprising that over half of the children surveyed worry about their parents arguing or divorcing. This shows how, when marriages are going through difficulties, children are more often aware than many parents might think they are. A rather worrying finding is that such a large proportion of children said that boredom is the biggest cause of unhappiness – given that kids have such a vast range of multimedia entertainment and extra-curricular activities available to them nowadays.”
Robert Hart from Intuitive Media added: “The children have told us that boredom is the biggest downer, along with adults who expect too much of them and having to work too hard. Children want more freedom to play, relax, pursue their hobbies and be creative.
Interesting5: Reports tell of explosions, small ash clouds and even molten lava within the last week on the volcanic island of Anak Krakatau, Indonesia. The specter is thus raised as to whether one of earth’s most renowned volcanoes is entering an active phase. Anak Krakatau, or "Child of Krakatau", is the successor to the former volcano of Krakatau. It was in 1883 that Krakatau burst in a famous, catastrophic eruption that culminated in the collapse of Krakatau Island into a great undersea volcanic crater, or caldera.
The cataclysmic eruption of Krakatau happened in August 1883. A stupendous blast (said to be heard in Perth, Australia, and on Mauritius) sent an ash cloud 50 miles above the Sunda Strait. Pyroclastic flows of burning hot ash reached the nearby tip of mainland Sumatra taking many lives. A tsunami, triggered either by the collapsing pyroclastic flows or the seafloor caving into to form the caldera. Much of the former island of Krakatau disappeared, either falling into the caldera or being blown literally into the sky by the great blast.
The great eruption of 1883 reshaped the map of the Sunda Strait. More than this, it triggered atmospheric effects felt world wide. Stratospheric sulfur dioxide helped to cool the atmosphere by as much as 2.2 degrees F in the year following the blast. And the high-level particulate matter made for spectacular red sunrises and sunsets.
Today, all that is left of Krakatau Island is the smaller island of Rakata. Then there is Anak Krakatau, which is a new land mass built atop the still active vent that had also fed Krakatau itself. Maybe, Anak will soon be bringing further geological change to this unsettled part of the earth.
Interesting6: Up to 30,000 residents and tourists could be under threat from a newly discovered tsunami risk in the Caribbean, according to experts in disaster risk management. The heavily populated coast of Guadeloupe will have little warning if a tsunami is triggered by the collapse of a volcano on the nearby island of Dominica.
A team of geologists, led by Dr Richard Teeuw from the University of Portsmouth, have discovered that a flank of the volcano Morne aux Diables ("Devils’ Peak") shows signs of collapse and if so, a million-ton chunk of rock could crash into the sea, producing tsunami waves up to almost 3 meters (10 feet) high. Such a rock fall could also weaken three million tones of rock upslope, potentially resulting in much larger landslides and waves of up to five meters.
Dr Teeuw said: “It’s not a case of if this landslide and tsunami will happen, but when. The trigger will probably be a major earthquake, occurring after the heavy rain and coastal erosion of the hurricane season. It could happen in a hundred years or it could happen next week.
“Guadeloupe is a densely populated island with popular tourist beaches, many of which are wide with low angle gradients, which leads to ‘tsunami run-up’ and increased wave heights. In places, there is no protection from coral reef which otherwise might absorb some of the tsunami wave energy.
“There would be damage to property and if people were on the beach then there could be loss of life. This part of the world is well-prepared for hurricane hazards, but is relatively unprepared for the rapid impact of a tsunami.” The vulnerable area of rock was left exposed several thousand years ago when the flank of the volcano collapsed into the sea.
Dr Teeuw will study the seabed for evidence of an ancient tsunami next year. Since the original collapse, coastal erosion has undercut cliffs along the over-steepened margin of the volcano, leaving the remaining flank of the volcano unstable.
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