May 9-10, 2009
Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Saturday afternoon:
Lihue, Kauai – 80
Honolulu, Oahu – 88
Kaneohe, Oahu – 80
Kahului, Maui – 86
Hilo, Hawaii – 83
Kailua-kona – 84
Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level – and on the highest mountains…at 5 p.m. Saturday evening:
Honolulu, Oahu – 84F
Hilo, Hawaii – 76
Haleakala Crater – 52 (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 37 (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 Saturday afternoon:
0.23 Mount Waialaele, Kauai
0.39 Poamoho 2, Oahu
0.04 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.00 Kahoolawe
0.33 West Wailuaiki, Maui
0.32 Pahoa, Big Island
Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map shows a 1027 millibar high pressure system located fa NE of the islands. This high pressure cell has a ridge running south and southwest of it, to a point north of Kauai. The placement of this ridge will provide light trade winds…although stronger and locally gusty in some places through Sunday. Winds becoming lighter Monday, varying between east and southeast.
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
A Hawaiian cat, great colors…named Kula
Light to moderately strong trade winds will blow through Sunday, then weaken again during the new work week…with returning volcanic haze. A high pressure ridge is located several hundred miles north of Kauai Saturday night. This trade wind producing ridge will keep our atmosphere clear of haze, and bring typical trade winds to our islands for the time being. The trade winds will falter again starting Monday, becoming light again through most of the new week ahead…with the good possibility of more haze returning to our island skies.
The overlying atmosphere remains stable, although with the trade winds blowing, we’ll see a few showers arriving along the windward sides…remaining dry along the leeward beaches. What showers that are able to fall, will take aim on the north and east facing windward sides…and perhaps a few light ones in the upcountry areas during the afternoons too. There isn’t very much chance for any heavy showers well into the future…not until a possible increase around the end of the new week ahead.
As noted in the paragraphs above, we have the trade winds back, which have cleared our skies of the volcanic haze. This is a very good thing, to finally see the color blue in the sky again. I suggest everyone gets out there this weekend to enjoy this trade wind flow. The reason I saw that, besides that its a weekend and all, is that the winds will be getting soft again right after the weekend. This in turn may turn our winds very light, and even to the southeast locally…with more voggy weather over us starting Monday.
I went to see another one of those action films I like so much…after work Friday everning. The film was called X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009), starring Hugh Jackman and Liev Schreiber, among many others. "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" tells the story of Wolverine’s epically violent and romantic past, his complex relationship with Victor Creed, and the ominous Weapon X program. Along the way, Wolverine encounters many mutants, both familiar and new, including surprise appearances by several legends of the X-Men universe.
As is often the case, I was delighted with all the intense action that this film brought to life. I had heard reviews on both sides, some with thumbs up, and others down. I definitely came down on the side of double thumbs up! Just in case you might be slightly curious, here’s a trailer.
It’s early Saturday evening as I begin writing this last section of today’s weather narrative. It’s cloudy up here in Kula, Maui this evening, although I can see sunny weather continuing down near the beaches. Glancing at this looping satellite image, we can see that there’s quite a bit of high cirrus clouds that are streaming up over the islands, carried our way on the strong upper winds aloft. The bulk of these icy clouds are covering the Big Island and Maui at the time of this writing, but may extend up over the rest of the state with time. ~~~ I had a great day, although got skunked in my surfing trip over to Lahaina early this morning. The real fun began when I got to the Seabury Crafts Fair, where there was lots and lots of folks. I had lots of people coming up to me and letting me know that they missed my tv weather show, which I can certainly understand. I drove down to Paia for some food shopping afterwards, and yet another bunch of folks came up to me and told me that they missed the show as well. I totally understand, as there is a part of me that misses it too! ~~~ I’m hunkered in at home this evening, planning on sitting out on my weather deck to see if the high clouds light up an nice shade of orange at sunset. They could put on a fine show again Sunday morning, at which point I’ll be back with your next new weather narrative. I hope you have a great Saturday night until then! Aloha for now…Glenn.
Interesting: Estimates of how much crude oil we have extracted from the planet vary wildly. Now, UK researchers have published a new estimate in the International Journal of Oil, Gas and Coal Technology that suggests we may have used more than we think. The idea that we are running out of oil is not a new one, but do we even know how much oil we have extracted from since the first commercial oil wells were sunk in the middle of the nineteenth century?
In 2008, chemists Istvan Lakatos and Julianna Lakatos-Szabo of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences theorized that less than 100 billion ton of crude oil has been produced since 1850 and that the average annual production rate is less than 700 million barrels per year.
They compared proven reserves and estimates of yet-to-find (YTF) resources and echoed the sentiment that we will soon face oil shortages even though a substantial part of those reserves remain in the ground untapped. Now, John Jones in the School of Engineering, at the University of Aberdeen, UK, suggests that the figures cited by Istvan Lakatos and Julianna Lakatos-Szabo for which they give no references grossly underestimates how much oil we have used already.
Jones says that we have used at least 135 billion barrels of oil since 1870, the period during which J.D. Rockefeller established The Standard Oil Company and began drilling in earnest. The oil industry now spans several generations, says Jones, and has historically been as uninterested in how much oil has been drawn as were economists, day-to-day and annual figures being of much greater concern.
However, in 2005, The Oil Depletion Analysis Centre (ODAC) in London provided a total figure of almost 1 trillion barrels of crude oil (944 billion barrels) since commercial drilling began. Even that figure does not add up, Jones explains. He has calculated a better estimate by using the volume of a barrel (42 US gallons, or 0.16 cubic meter) and a crude oil density of 0.9 tons per cubic meter. ODAC’s 944 billion barrels is thus the equivalent of 135 billion tons.
Interesting2: New research that uses an innovative approach to study, for the first time, the relative contributions of food and exercise habits to the development of the obesity epidemic has concluded that the rise in obesity in the United States since the 1970s was virtually all due to increased energy intake. How much of the obesity epidemic has been caused by excess calorie intake and how much by reductions in physical activity has been long debated and while experts agree that making it easier for people to eat less and exercise more are both important for combating it, they debate where the public health focus should be.
A study presented on Friday at the European Congress on Obesity is the first to examine the question of the proportional contributions to the obesity epidemic by combining metabolic relationships, the laws of thermodynamics, epidemiological data and agricultural data.
"There have been a lot of assumptions that both reduced physical activity and increased energy intake have been major drivers of the obesity epidemic. Until now, nobody has proposed how to quantify their relative contributions to the rise in obesity since the 1970s.
This study demonstrates that the weight gain in the American population seems to be virtually all explained by eating more calories. It appears that changes in physical activity played a minimal role," said the study’s leader, Professor Boyd Swinburn, chair of population health and director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Obesity Prevention at Deakin University in Australia.
The scientists started by testing 1,399 adults and 963 children to determine how many calories their bodies burn in total under free-living conditions. The test is the most accurate measure of total calorie burning in real-life situations. Once they had determined each person’s calorie burning rate, Swinburn and his colleagues were able to calculate how much adults needed to eat in order to maintain a stable weight and how much children needed to eat in order to maintain a normal growth curve.
They then worked out how much Americans were actually eating, using national food supply data (the amount of food produced and imported, minus the amount exported, thrown away and used for animals or other non-human uses) from the 1970s and the early 2000s.
The researchers used their findings to predict how much weight they would expect Americans to have gained over the 30-year period studied if food intake were the only influence. They used data from a nationally representative survey (NHANES) that recorded the weight of Americans in the 1970s and early 2000s to determine the actual weight gain over that period.
"If the actual weight increase was the same as what we predicted, that meant that food intake was virtually entirely responsible. If it wasn’t, that meant changes in physical activity also played a role," Swinburn said. "If the actual weight gain was higher than predicted, that would suggest that a decrease in physical activity played a role."
The researchers found that in children, the predicted and actual weight increase matched exactly, indicating that the increases in energy intake alone over the 30 years studied could explain the weight increase.
Interesting3: A decision involving the iconic polar bear could determine whether protecting endangered species might also help save the earth from global warming. The Obama administration is approaching a weekend deadline to decide whether it should allow government agencies to cite the federal Endangered Species Act, which protects the bear, for imposing limits on greenhouse gases from power plants, factories and automobiles even if the pollution occurs thousands of miles from where the polar bear lives.
The species law that affords protection for plants, animals and fish that face possible extinction became entangled with the need to reduce pollution linked to global warming more than a year ago. The Interior Department declared the polar bear a threatened species, citing the decline of Arctic sea ice due to global warming.
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