September 6-7, 2009
Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Sunday afternoon:
Lihue, Kauai – 82
Honolulu, Oahu – 85
Kaneohe, Oahu – 83
Kahului, Maui – 87
Hilo, Hawaii – 79
Kailua-kona – 87
Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level around the state – and on the highest mountains…at 5 p.m. Sunday evening:
Barking Sands, Kauai – 84F
Princeville, Kauai – 75
Haleakala Crater – 54 (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 68 (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:
1.18 Mount Waialaele, Kauai
1.01 Poamoho 2, Oahu
0.22 Molokai
0.02 Lanai
0.02 Kahoolawe
2.16 West Wailuaiki, Maui
0.51 Mountain View, Big Island
Marine Winds – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a 1026 millibar high pressure system to the north-northeast of the islands. Trade winds will be active through Monday…although lighter than they have been.
Satellite and Radar Images: To view the cloud conditions we have here in Hawaii, please use the following satellite links, starting off with this 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.
Tropical Cyclone activity in the eastern and central Pacific – Here’s the latest weather information coming out of the National Hurricane Center, covering the eastern north Pacific. You can find the latest tropical cyclone information for the central north Pacific (where Hawaii is located) by clicking on this link to the Central Pacific Hurricane Center. Here’s a tracking map covering both the eastern and central Pacific Ocean. A satellite image, which shows the entire ocean area between Hawaii and the Mexican coast…can be found here.
Aloha Paragraphs
Down the line…inside the breaking wave
Lighter trade winds continuing through the holiday, into the work week…light to moderately strong. A 1026 millibar high pressure system has movd eastward, ending up northeast of the islands Sunday evening, as shown on this weather map.
An area of clouds and localized showers moved in over the windward sides generally today…although will be giving way to drier weather during the Labor Day holiday into Tuesday. The leeward sides have had more than the normal amount of clouds too, but much less in the way of showers. Conditions will improve during the day into Tiuesday, with less clouds and showers, and clouds. Computer models continue to bring another area of minor moisture our way around the middle of the week.
It’s Sunday evening here in Kula, Maui, as I begin writing this last section of today’s narrative update. Looking at this IR satellite image, we see the cloud area…which brought an increase in showers to our windward sides Sunday. That satellite picture also shows the brighter, white high cirrus clouds that increased greatly during the day. Here’s a looping radar image so we can keep track of those windward biased showers. As shown, the showers are now over Oahu, and moving towards Kauai, with Maui and the Big Island already clearing to some degree.
~~~ I just got back from a long walk, not the shorter ones that I usually during, with my rather tight work schedule. It was like a winter day today in many areas, with lots of clouds and showers. The one main difference was the temperatures were warmer than those December through March temperatures can be on a cool winter day. Case in point, at 6pm HST, my outside thermometer was showing a relatively warm 67.5F degrees. During the winter, on a similar looking day, it could easily be more like 57F degrees, and I would have on a down jacket, rather than a blue T shirt. I’ll be back either later tonight, with a few new music video’s, or Monday morning with your next new weather narrative. Aloha for now…Glenn.
Extra: famous quote: "Computers let you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history…with the possible exception of tequila." – Mitch Ratliffe
Extra2: Youtube video: Compilation of the best Squirrel suit skydiving videos
Extra3: Youtube video: Fleetwood Mac…Dreams
Interesting: Forecasts of climate change are about to go seriously out of kilter. One of the world’s top climate modelers said Thursday we could be about to enter "one or even two decades during which temperatures cool. "People will say this is global warming disappearing," he told more than 1500 of the world’s top climate scientists gathering in Geneva at the UN’s World Climate Conference.
"I am not one of the skeptics," insisted Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University, Germany. "However, we have to ask the nasty questions ourselves or other people will do it." Few climate scientists go as far as Latif, an author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
But more and more agree that the short-term prognosis for climate change is much less certain than once thought. This is bad timing. The UN’s World Meteorological Organization called the conference in order to draft a global plan for providing "climate services" to the world: that is, to deliver climate predictions useful to everyone from farmers worried about the next rainy season to doctors trying to predict malaria epidemics and builders of dams, roads and other infrastructure who need to assess the risk of floods and droughts 30 years hence.
But some of the climate scientists gathered in Geneva to discuss how this might be done admitted that, on such timescales, natural variability is at least as important as the long-term climate changes from global warming. "In many ways we know more about what will happen in the 2050s than next year," said Vicky Pope from the UK Met Office.
Latif predicted that in the next few years a natural cooling trend would dominate over warming caused by humans. The cooling would be down to cyclical changes to ocean currents and temperatures in the North Atlantic, a feature known as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO).
Breaking with climate-change orthodoxy, he said NAO cycles were probably responsible for some of the strong global warming seen in the past three decades. "But how much? The jury is still out," he told the conference. The NAO is now moving into a colder phase. Latif said NAO cycles also explained the recent recovery of the Sahel region of Africa from the droughts of the 1970s and 1980s.
James Murphy, head of climate prediction at the Met Office, agreed and linked the NAO to Indian monsoons, Atlantic hurricanes and sea ice in the Arctic. "The oceans are key to decadal natural variability," he said. Another favorite climate nostrum was upturned when Pope warned that the dramatic Arctic ice loss in recent summers was partly a product of natural cycles rather than global warming.
Preliminary reports suggest there has been much less melting this year than in 2007 or 2008. In candid mood, climate scientists avoided blaming nature for their faltering predictions, however. "Model biases are also still a serious problem. We have a long way to go to get them right.
They are hurting our forecasts," said Tim Stockdale of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in Reading, UK. The world may badly want reliable forecasts of future climate. But such predictions are proving as elusive as the perfect weather forecast.
Interesting2: A key number in the struggle to tackle global warming is flawed. The cost of adapting to the effects of climate change is two to three times the figure quoted by the UN climate change convention, a new study claims. The UN has estimated that meeting health needs, adapting farming and infrastructure, and so on will cost $70 to 100 billion a year by 2030.
Now Martin Parry of Imperial College London says this "back of a metro ticket calculation" ignores major sectors, including energy generation and manufacturing, as well as the costs of protecting people from inland flooding and coastal storms, and of maintaining ecosystems. It badly underestimates other areas, too.
"If you read the small print, the health figure covers the cost of preventing increases in just three diseases – malaria, diarrhea and malnutrition," says Parry. "The real figure will be far higher." Parry fears that the UN figure could be damaging if it is used when politicians meet in December to agree on future emissions targets. They might conclude it is cheaper to adapt to climate change than to prevent it, he says.
Interesting3: In a classic case of a perverse incentive, California state law actually encourages homeowners to build in brushy canyons prone to massive wildfires like the "Station fire", which burned over 350,000 hectares and destroyed dozens of homes near Los Angeles this month. In 1968, the state legislature mandated that every property owner must be able to buy affordable fire insurance, no matter how risky their location.
An industry-sponsored syndicate, the California Fair Plan, serves as insurer of last resort for those deemed too high-risk for conventional fire insurance. Some 17,400 owners of brushland property now obtain insurance through this route, says Mike Harris, a spokesman for the plan.
That may be a bad idea, because coastal brushland, or chaparral, is naturally prone to infrequent but very intense fires. Unlike in forest, where planned fires can clear out dead wood and keep wildfires small, fire managers can do little to prevent massive fires in chaparral.
Homeowners can take some steps to reduce their risk, such as replacing wood shingles with non-flammable material – but anyone living in chaparral must expect to be burned out eventually. "We’ve been deluding ourselves to think we can stop these fires.
They’re going to burn no matter what," says Jon Keeley, an ecologist with the US Geological Survey in Three Rivers, California. The best solution in the long term, fire experts agree, is to avoid building in the riskiest areas – a solution made harder by the state’s insistence on insuring such properties.
Interesting4: Dam projects by neighboring states are drastically reducing the flow of the Tigris and Euphrates and helping to turn a once-fertile plain into desert. Phil Sands and Nizar Latif report as an environmental crisis deepens. As bombs continue to tear apart its towns and villages, Iraq is now in the grip of an environmental crisis that experts and officials warn may do what decades of war have not been able to — destroy the country.
The new war on Iraq, says one member of the country’s parliament, "is a war of water". The Tigris and Euphrates, two of the world’s great water courses fed life to the historic lands of Mesopotamia, "the land between two rivers".
The previously lush plains south of Baghdad are widely held to be the cradle of civilization, the birthplace of some of humanity’s greatest achievements and earliest empires.
Today, however, those same rivers are increasingly starved of water. The floodplains on either side of the Euphrates and Tigris, Iraq’s old fertile agricultural heart lands, are parched. In northern Iraq, underground supplies of water have been so depleted they may never recover.
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