May 3-4, 2009
Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Sunday afternoon:
Lihue, Kauai – 81
Honolulu, Oahu – 82
Kaneohe, Oahu – 81
Kahului, Maui – 86
Hilo, Hawaii – 82
Kailua-kona – 83
Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level – and on the highest mountains…at 5 p.m. Sunday evening:
Kahului, Maui – 82F
Lihue, Kauai – 75
Haleakala Crater – 55 (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 46 (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:
0.02 Hanapepe, Kauai
0.04 Maunawili, Oahu
0.00 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.00 Kahoolawe
0.06 West Wailuaiki, Maui
0.09 Pahoa, Big Island
Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map shows a 1024 millibar high pressure system located a good distance to the ENE of the islands now. This high will remain weak and far enough away from us, so that our winds will be generally light southeasterlies 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
Voggy sunset Sunday…lots of haze
The light southeast breeze have enveloped all the islands now, with onshore sea breezes during the day…and offshore flowing land breezes at night. These southeast breezes are bringing hazy weather (volcanic in origin) to our islands, which will continue Monday and Tuesday. Light trade winds will begin again Wednesday and Thursday, lasting through the rest of the week…blowing the haze away slowly.
The atmosphere remains dry and stable, which will continue limiting showers greatly. There will be a few showers falling locally, most generously over the interior sections during the afternoon hours. We may begin to see a modest increase in showers around the middle of the new week, especially along the windward sides during the night and early morning hours…as the trade winds return then.
It’s Sunday evening as I begin writing this last section of today’s weather narrative. The main feature in our Hawaiian Island weather story is now the rather thick volcanic haze, along with light winds. The air mass remains quite dry too, so that we’re mostly dry as well. This reality will continue through the middle of the week, at which point light trade winds will return. It may take a day or even two before we see good clearing of our atmosphere.
~~~ I went over to Haiku, on the windward side early this morning, and bought some beautiful orchids. I then drove down to Baldwin Beach, and had a great walk on that long sandy shore, dipping into the ocean for a swim at the end. I then went into Paia for a few things, before getting back upcountry to Kula…where I spent the rest of the day.
~~~
I have done lots of domestic chores, which was quite a chore, but feels good to have done it now at the end of the day. It’s hazy and cloudy up here, and I see that a few light drops have fallen out of the sky, but hardly anything compared to the last several afternoons.
~~~
I’m sitting here sipping on a Mirror Pond Pale Ale as I type out these last words. I’m just about ready to head down the stairs, from this weather tower, for an early dinner. I hope you have a great Sunday night, and might return on Monday for the next new weather narrative. Aloha for now…Glenn.
Interesting: Invasive species are putting major strains on our environment, our pocketbooks and our health, new studies suggest, and our nation’s demand for exotic pets may be to blame. The wild animal trade may even be upping our risk for diseases like the current outbreak of swine flu.
Between 2000 and 2006, the United States imported nearly 1.5 billion live animals from 190 countries, mostly for sale as pets, according to a paper published today in the journal Science. Eighty percent of those animals came from wild populations.
Nearly 70 percent of them came from Southeast Asia, a known hotspot for emerging diseases that, like the swine flu, can jump from animals to people. Once invasive species have escaped into the environment, they can cause a cascade of problems that are expensive to fix.
In another paper, published last week in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, European researchers found that controlling an invasive species, can cost $10 million or more. "That’s what hits home," said Katherine Smith, a conservation biologist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island – "money and disease."
Interesting2: The American Lung Association’s State of the Air 2009 report acknowledges substantial progress against air pollution in many areas of the country, but finds nearly every major city still with some problem pollutants. Sixteen cities making this year’s 25 most ozone-polluted list experienced worsened ozone (smog) problems than last year’s report found.
Fifty-eight percent of people in the United States live in counties with recorded unhealthy levels of ozone air pollution, measured against the tighter standard in effect since March 2008. This year, 12 more California counties received failing grades than last year, reflecting the tighter national ozone standard implemented in 2008.
The Los Angeles-Long Beach-Riverside metro area demonstrates a continued and notable improvement trend for annual particle pollution levels (dropping to number three on that most-polluted list nationwide), based on State of the Air report grades during the past decade, although particle pollution levels remain unhealthy.
Ozone is the most widespread form of air pollution. Ozone is a powerful gas formed most often when sunlight reacts with vapors when vehicles, factories, power plants and other sources burn fuel. Ozone pollution immediately irritates the lungs when inhaled, resulting in something like a bad sunburn.
The American Lung Association’s State of the Air 2009 report finds that 6 out of 10 Americans –186.1 million people — live in areas where air pollution levels endanger lives.
State of the Air 2009 acknowledges substantial progress against air pollution in many areas of the country, but finds nearly every major city still burdened by air pollution. Despite America’s growing “green” movement, the air in many cities became dirtier since the last report.
Interesting3: A French study of the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic, which analyzed mortality rates in approximately three-quarters of the European population, has concluded that it is unlikely that the virus, often described as Spanish Flu, originated in Europe. Published in the May issue of Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses, the research shows a high degree of synchronicity in the 14 countries studied, including Spain, with the flu peaking in October to November 1918.
The study, carried out by a team from INSERM, the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research, provides invaluable background briefing for clinicians and media during the current pandemic alert.
Key facts
• Overall deaths increased by 86 per cent in the 14 European countries studied during the 1918-1919 pandemic, with 1.98 million excess deaths recorded. When these figures were extrapolated to cover the 25 per cent of Europe not covered by the study, the figure reached 2.64 million.
• Excess mortality rates for the individual countries covered by the INSERM analysis were: Bulgaria (102%), England and Wales (55%), Finland (33%), Sweden (74%), France (66%), Germany (73%), Italy (172%), Norway (65%), Denmark (58%), Portugal (102%), Scotland (57%), Spain (87%), Switzerland (69%) and The Netherlands (84%).
• Figures for the worldwide death toll remain very imprecise. A first American report in 1927 suggested that the main 1918-1919 wave was responsible for 21 million deaths worldwide. A revised estimate in 1991 put the figure between 24.7 and 39.3 million and another in 2002 set the death toll at up to 100 million to take into account the lack of data in a large part of the world.
• The authors point out that the source of the 1918 pandemic remains unclear. A recent analysis of the 1918 H1N1 genome failed to single out a particular location. Theories put forward by various researchers include Asia, a British army post in France in 1916, the USA and Spain.
• The first reported pandemic was in 412 BC and the first attributed to influenza was in 1580. Since then 31 influenza pandemics have been reported, with the five most recent being in 1889, 1900, 1918, 1957 and 1968. The 1918 pandemic was the most deadly in modern history.
Other useful background information in the paper includes the start and finish dates of the pandemic outbreaks in the 14 countries studied, with graphs showing the peaks in each country.
Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses is the first journal to specialize exclusively on influenza and other respiratory viruses and is edited by one of the world’s leading flu experts, Dr Alan Hampson.
It is the official journal of the International Society for Influenza and Other Respiratory Virus Diseases, an independent scientific professional society promoting the prevention, detection, treatment, and control of influenza and other respiratory virus diseases.
Interesting4: In 1918 a human influenza virus known as the Spanish flu spread through the central United States while a swine respiratory disease occurred concurrently. A Kansas State University researcher has found that the virus causing the pandemic was able to infect and replicate in pigs, but did not kill them, unlike in other mammalian hosts like monkeys, mice and ferrets where the infection has been lethal.
Juergen A. Richt, Regents Distinguished Professor of Diagnostic Medicine and Pathobiology at K-State’s College of Veterinary Medicine, studied the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic with colleagues from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, U.S. Department of Agriculture and Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
Their research supports the hypothesis that the 1918 pandemic influenza virus and the virus causing the swine flu were the same. Richt said the virus was able to infect and replicate in swine and cause mild respiratory disease. The 1918 virus spread through the pig population, adapted to the swine and resulted in the current lineage of the H1N1 swine influenza viruses.
The researchers’ study is published in the May 2009 Journal of Virology. "This study emphasizes that an influenza virus, which is known to induce a lethal infection in ferrets and macaques, is not highly virulent in pigs, indicating a potential resistance of swine to highly virulent influenza viruses," Richt said.
"It also suggests that pigs could have played a role in maintaining and spreading the 1918 human pandemic influenza virus." Swine flu is a respiratory disease of pigs caused by type A influenza that regularly causes outbreaks of influenza among the animals and can be transmitted to humans.
It is a typical zoonotic agent. While swine flu was first recognized as a disease in 1918, there also were reports of the influenza occurring in the Midwest in 1930. For the study, the researchers used the 1918 pandemic virus and a 1930 H1N1 influenza virus for experimental infections in swine.
The 1930 virus was chosen as a virus because it is thought to be a descendent of the 1918 virus, Richt said. The researchers did not find a significant difference in effects from the 1918 and 1930 viruses in infected pigs. This was surprising, since the 1918 virus killed more than 20 million people and was lethal to ferrets, mice and macaques.
Another surprising finding from the study was the rapid antibody response in the animals infected with the 1918 virus, which is not typically reported for the swine influenza virus. Richt said he plans to conduct a follow-up project that will study what makes a swine flu virus a pandemic flu virus.
Interesting5: What do you do when you have a fossil quarry that has yielded some of the most important and rarest of dinosaur fossils in North America, but the fossil-bearing layer of rock is tilted at 70 degrees and there is so much rock that not even jackhammers can get you to the fossils any longer? That was the problem facing Dinosaur National Monument at a Lower Cretaceous dinosaur quarry — the one that has produced the only complete brontosaur skulls from the last 80 million years of the Age of Dinosaurs in North America.
The site is so scientifically important that excavations cannot be stopped, yet there was no way to reach the bones. Dave Larsen, Steve Bors, and Tim George, a blasting team from Rocky Mountain National Park, rode to the rescue in mid-April.
Over several days these skilled employees, using their expertise with explosives, blew away the rock covering the fossils and exposed a significant amount of the fossil-bearing layer so that excavation can begin again this year. Without their talents, scientifically important fossils would have remained locked underground in their stony mausoleum.
Fossil excavation often uses small tools, either pneumatic or manual, to carefully remove rock from delicate fossils. However, in some instances, instruments that are more powerful are needed. Although explosives might seem extreme, in the right setting and in the right hands, they are the right tool for the job — staff at Dinosaur National Monument can certainly testify to that.
Interesting6: Dolphins have a clever trick that doesn’t involve jumping in the air for fish: They can overcome sleep deprivation and remain constantly vigilant for days at a time by resting one half of their brain while the other half remains conscious. Because they need to periodically come up for air and keep an eye out for potential predators, dolphins can’t curl up and zonk out at night like land mammals can. So they must stay somewhat conscious and sleep with the proverbial one eye open.
Sam Ridgway of the U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program wondered if this constant watchfulness would dull their senses, like sleep deprivation does in humans (as anyone who has pulled an all-nighter knows). To investigate the effects of this mode of sleep on the dolphins, Ridgway and his colleagues trained two dolphins to respond to a 1.5-second beep sounded randomly against a background of 0.5-second beeps. (The sounds were low enough that they didn’t bother the dolphins in their daytime swims around their tank, but the random tone would still catch the dolphins’ attention.)
Even after listening to the tone for five straight days, the dolphins continued to respond to the beep just as sharply as they had at the beginning. Next, two of the researchers, Allen Goldblatt and Don Carder, designed a visual stimulus test to see if the dolphins were just as vigilant with their eyes. They also continued to see if the dolphins responded to the beeps.
Dolphins have binocular vision (with their eyes sitting on opposite sides of their head), so the researchers trained one of the dolphins (named Say) to recognized two shapes, either three horizontal red bars or one vertical green bar. They trained Say with her right eye first. The scientists thought that because half of the dolphin’s brain would be asleep during testing, Say would only recognize the shapes with the eye connected to the conscious half of her brain.
But she gave them a surprise: She trained her left eye on the shapes, even though that eye had not seen the shapes before. Ridgway said this must mean that information is transferred between the two hemispheres of the brain. The dolphins proved just as sharp with their eyes as they were with their ears: After 120 hours, they still saw the shapes. Researchers checked the dolphins’ blood for physical signs of sleep deprivation, but couldn’t find any. The results of the research are detailed in the May 1 issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology.
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