May 17-18, 2009
Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Sunday afternoon:
Lihue, Kauai – 82
Honolulu, Oahu – 85
Kaneohe, Oahu – 81
Kahului, Maui – 85
Hilo, Hawaii – 84
Kailua-kona – 84
Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level – and on the highest mountains…at 5 p.m. Sunday evening:
Kapalua, Maui – 81F
Lihue, Maui – 72
Haleakala Crater – 32 (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 34 (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 Sunday afternoon:
0.91 Wainiha, Kauai
0.43 Hawaii Kai, Oahu
0.00 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.02 Kahoolawe
0.03 Kahakuloa, Maui
0.48 Kapapala Ranch, Big Island
Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map shows a low pressure system to the north of the state, with a weakening cold front moving over Maui County towards the Big Island. Winds will be on the light side through Tuesday.
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
Sandy Kihei beaches…Maui
The shower bearing cold front is pushing down into the island chain, with breezy Kona winds ahead of it…and breezy cooler north to northest breezes in its wake. Our local atmosphere was hazy to very hazy Sunday in many areas. Winds have become stronger later Sunday, as north to northeast winds fill in behind the front on Kauai and Oahu and Maui. The winds are strong enough around Kauai and Oahu, that the NWS has issued a small craft wind advisory. These haze clearing breezes won’t last long however, as another light wind episode occurs…keeping our winds lighter than usual through the second half of the upcoming week.
Skies are generally clear to partly cloudy ahead of the cold front, although showers will accompany the front over Kauai and Oahu, reaching Maui during the night into early Monday morning.
The Big Island should see it arrive later Monday…stalling there into Tuesday. Showers will be briefly heavy here and there, with the windward sides receiving the most generous rainfall. As the cooler north to northeast winds arrive behind the front, drier air will generally end the precipitation. The front will stall over either Maui or the Big Island, so that showers may continue a while longer there.
There continues to be a few thunderstorms forming along the leading edge of the front, to the northeast of the islands. Using this satellite image, we can see the band of clouds having passed Kauai, moving over Oahu…on its way to the islands of Maui County. There is a rather large area of clouds over the Big Island, which came up from the southwest. We can check out this looping radar image, to keep an eye on the showers that get brought into the state Sunday evening into Monday morning.
It’s Sunday evening as I begin writing this last section of today’s weather narrative. Here on Maui, it was very voggy all day, as we wait for the late cold front to arrive. Looking at the wind gust reports on Kauai and Oahu, behind the cold front, they are strong and gusty in some places. Lihue, Kauai had winds gusting to 36 mph, while winds were just topping 30 mph on Oahu. These winds are relatively cool, at least for this time of year, as they come in from the north to northwest. The winds on Maui are lighter, out ahead of the cold front, although just at sunset here in Kula, my wind chimes are ringing out on the south to SW Kona winds ahead of the frontal boundary. I expect showers to arrive at some point later in the night, and then the front will either stall, or could reach the Big Island later in the day Monday. ~~~ My Mom and Dad called me on the phone, and said they just had a big earthquake in the southern California area, somewhere around 5 on the richtor scale. They said it shook them up pretty good! ~~~ I’ll be back early Monday morning with your next new weather narrative. I hope you have a great Sunday night! Aloha for now…Glenn.
The amazing Lyre bird…the songs are incredible!
Interesting: A Swedish climate change study released recently, called for focusing assistance on the world’s most vulnerable poor communities. The study by Sweden’s Commission on Climate Change and Development said the world’s most vulnerable communities have somewhat adapted to climate change as many have already felt its impacts.
Fighting poverty and climate change are inseparable and must be solved together in order to pursue goals of development in poor countries, the study said. The poor have no voice in the current debate on climate change at the highest levels of government and international organizations, it added.
The study was carried out with information gathered in visits to countries with varied environments: Cambodia’s Mekong Delta; Mali, a semi-arid country; and Bolivia, a high altitude country with a complex geography. "Climate change impacts are already here and happening faster than predicted," the study said.
"Arctic ice and tropical glaciers are melting, weather-related disasters are increasing, oceans are getting more acidic, changing ecosystems – we have no other option than to adapt." The study was given to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon at UN headquarters in New York as the UN is preparing for the final conference in Copenhagen December 7-18 to try to adopt a document to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which will expire in 2012.
The protocol deals with the regulations of greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming. The Swedish commission called for the mobilization of additional funds to help the most vulnerable communities like small island and low-income nations, but said the money should not come at the expense of existing funds for development in poor countries.
It called on donor countries to mobilize between 1 billion and 2 billion dollars annually to assist the vulnerable communities and also to build democratic and efficient governance in order to receive and allocate the new funding, particularly to local governments.
Interesting2: Contrary to the industry’s position that visible drink labels will promote responsible drinking, young people are, instead, using these visible standard drink labels to increase or even maximize the amount of alcohol they consume at the lowest cost possible. According to a new study, young people in Australia have very high awareness of standard drink labeling.
However, this was predominately to help them choose the drinks that would get them drunk in the shortest time possible. The labels also served as guides, ‘advising’ them on which drink would reduce the time needed to get drunk and the least amount they would need to drink – hence getting the best ‘value’ for their money.
The study examines the young people’s perceptions of standard drink labeling, the purposes for which they use the labels and the potential impact on their alcohol consumption. "Participants generally agreed that they notice drink labels and take in account what to purchase and consume.
While earlier research with adult beer and alcohol drinkers has shown that standard drink labeling enables them to drink safely and responsibly, this motivation is not evident in the consumption choices with young drinkers and might even be counter-productive", said co-author Professor Sandra Jones from the Centre for Health Initiatives, University of Wollongong.
Interesting3: Climate change, fishing and commercial shipping top the list of threats to the ocean off the West Coast of the United States. "Every single spot of the ocean along the West Coast," said Ben Halpern, a marine ecologist at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at the University of California at Santa Barbara, "is affected by 10 to 15 different human activities annually."
In a two-year study to document the way humans are affecting the oceans in this region, Halpern and colleagues overlaid data on the location and intensity of 25 human-derived sources of ecological stress, including climate change, commercial and recreational fishing, land-based sources of pollution and ocean-based commercial activities. With the information, they produced a composite map of the status of West Coast marine ecosystems.
The work was published online in the journal Conservation Letters, and was conducted at NCEAS. NCEAS is primarily funded by NSF’s Division of Environmental Biology. "This important analysis of the geography and magnitude of land-based stressors should help focus attention on the hot-spots where coordinated management of land and ocean activities is needed," said Phillip Taylor, section head in NSF’s Division of Ocean Sciences.
The lead scientists on the study conducted a similar analysis on a global scale; the results were published last year in Science. By refining the methods used in the global study and applying them at a regional scale, the scientists were able to test how well the results predicted regional ocean health.
"We found two remarkable and unexpected results in this research," said Halpern. "Ocean management needs to move beyond single-sector management and towards comprehensive ecosystem-based management if it is to be effective at protecting and sustaining ocean health.
Interesting4: NASA’s Kepler spacecraft has begun its search for other Earth-like worlds. The mission, which launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on March 6, will spend the next three-and-a-half years staring at more than 100,000 stars for telltale signs of planets. Kepler has the unique ability to find planets as small as Earth that orbit sun-like stars at distances where temperatures are right for possible lakes and oceans.
"Now the fun begins," said William Borucki, Kepler science principal investigator at NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. "We are all really excited to start sorting through the data and discovering the planets." Scientists and engineers have spent the last two months checking out and calibrating the Kepler spacecraft.
Data have been collected to characterize the imaging performance as well as the noise level in the measurement electronics. The scientists have constructed the list of targets for the start of the planet search, and this information has been loaded onto the spacecraft.
"If Kepler got into a staring contest, it would win," said James Fanson, Kepler project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "The spacecraft is ready to stare intently at the same stars for several years so that it can precisely measure the slightest changes in their brightness caused by planets."
Kepler will hunt for planets by looking for periodic dips in the brightness of stars — events that occur when orbiting planets cross in front of their stars and partially block the light. The mission’s first finds are expected to be large, gas planets situated close to their stars. Such discoveries could be announced as early as next year. Kepler is a NASA Discovery mission.
NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., is the home organization of the science principal investigator, and is responsible for the ground system development, mission operations and science data analysis. JPL manages the Kepler mission development. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. of Boulder, Colo., is responsible for developing the Kepler flight system and supporting mission operations.
Interesting5: The National Science Foundation (NSF) has put out a special report detailing known changes to the planet related to global warming. These are not things that might happen, but things that have. The highlights, directly from the NSF: Ecologists have noted marked changes in the habitats of the species they study — changes in the places where they find a particular species, changes in the dates plants first sprout and bloom, changes in plant growth rates and even signs of evolutionary adaptation brought on by a warming climate.
In some cases, species extinctions appear linked to climate change. Ocean scientists have recorded higher temperatures and higher ocean acidity, which alter the characteristics of the most fundamental organisms of the ocean food chain. Coral reefs — some of which have thrived for centuries — have died off suddenly as a result of ocean temperatures that exceed the corals’ ability to survive.
Polar scientists have watched vast tracts of Arctic sea ice melt away, leaving behind more open water than anyone can remember seeing during any previous Northern Hemisphere summer. Glaciologists have witnessed ice shelves — once thought too large to be influenced by anything short of cataclysmic environmental change — break up into a churning sea of icebergs in a matter of days.
Interesting6: Many raindrops travel at "super-terminal" velocities, faster than was thought possible. As a result, meteorologists may be miscalculating how much it rains. Previously, it was assumed that all raindrops fall at terminal velocity, a constant maximum speed that is determined by the interplay of gravity and drag.
The velocity for individual drops is considered to be largely controlled by their size: larger drops fall faster than smaller drops, due to their greater mass. Fernando García-García of the National Autonomous University of Mexico and colleagues measured the shadows of natural raindrops passing through a ray of infrared light.
They found that up to half exceed their terminal velocity. Some travel as much as 10 times faster, for their size. "Others had detected this before, but everybody disregarded it, blaming it on an error," says Garcia-Garcia. The team suspects that the super-terminal drops may be fragments of larger drops broken apart as they fall.
"If a large drop breaks into several fragments, each drop will have the speed of the large drop, at least temporarily, until the smaller drops slow to their new terminal velocity," García-García says. As a result, meteorologists may be overestimating total rainfall by up to 20 per cent, say the team.
Weather forecasters use total rainfall figures to predict floods, and climatologists use the estimates to gauge how rain patterns are changing with climate change. Total rainfall over an area is generally calculated indirectly, by using a Doppler radar that bounces electromagnetic waves off the raindrops.
The radar can measure rainfall over thousands of square kilometers. But the radar records only the speed of drops. This is then used to infer the average size of the drops. This is then multiplied by the number of drops to give a total volume of water. "If you get a signal back and see drops are moving quickly, you assume they are big drops, but in reality they are small drops moving faster," says Garcia-Garcia.
Ana Barros of Duke University in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, says meteorologists’ rainfall estimates are unlikely to be too far wrong, pointing out that the super-terminal drops would soon slow down after fragmenting from larger drops.
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