Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs / January 24-25, 2010

January 24-25, 2010

Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Sunday afternoon:

Lihue, Kauai – 76
Honolulu, Oahu – 78
Kaneohe, Oahu – 79
Kaunakakai, Molokai – 82
Kahului, Maui – 83
Hilo, Hawaii – 82
Kailua-kona – 81

Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level around the state – and on the highest mountains…at 4pm Sunday afternoon:

Port Allen, Kauai – 81F
Princeville, kauai – 73

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:

0.96 Puu Opae, Kauai  
0.14 Schofield South, Oahu
0.00 Molokai 
0.04 Lanai
0.00 Kahoolawe
0.00 Maui 
0.01 Saddle Quarry, Big Island

Marine Winds – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a dissipating cold front over Kauai. At the same time, we have a weak 1014 millibar high pressure system to the west-northwest…with its associated ridge extending east. Our winds will be light Monday, picking up from the south and southwest ahead of the next cold front Tuesday.

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

Hawaiian Artwork…Mark Webster

Slack winds will remain in place, as a dissipating cold front dies over Kauai…then Kona winds will return ahead of the next cold front later Monday into Tuesday. Here’s a picture of this dissipating satellite image, with its associated clouds mostly over Kauai, although a few did slip into the Channel between there and Oahu. The last couple of days have seen south and SW winds, which have carried considerable volcanic haze up from the Big Island vents, over the smaller islands. As we have light winds still around Sunday evening, this vog will remain in place for the time being. As we begin to see increasing Kona winds later Monday through Tuesday, we’ll see a new push of these volcanic emissions coming up from the Big Island. This next cold front, which is expected to arrive later Tuesday on Kauai, will work its way down through the rest of the island chain into the middle of the new week ahead…with yet another front pushing in our direction late in the work week into next weekend.

Now that we’ve seen yet another cold front leave Maui and the Big Island high and dry…we’ll begin looking at the next cold front…which the models are promising somewhat more rainfall.  This next chance for more showers will be around the middle of the new week, when that next cold front arrives. It’s too soon to know for certain just how showery this next front will be, although the computer models are suggesting it would be a better rainfall producer (than this most recent one)…pushing all the way through the island chain. The islands could certainly use some precipitation, especially those areas from Oahu down through Maui County and the Big Island! The one problem, and we’ve seen this consistently through this winter season so far, is that the frontal boundary will lack…what we call upper level support. This simply means that there won’t be enough cold air aloft to enhance the incoming showers. This front however, may have more moisture to work with, so that we hopefully will see more showers…and they may even reach Maui and the Big Island this time.

It’s Sunday evening, as I begin writing the last section of today’s narrative.  Sunday was a mellow day here in the 50th state, with just that dissipating cold front that kept some clouds hovering over the area from Kauai down through Oahu. These quickly diminishing clouds weren’t the only thing hanging around, especially down around parts of the Big Island, and Maui County. This of course was the very thick volcanic haze, which has dimished air visibilities like crazy! This vog is super dense, and is making our air mass incredibily difficult to see through, and I’m hearing some folks complaining about it influencing their health in a negative way. Looking across the central valley, from here in Kula, Maui, towards the West Maui Mountains…those near 5,800 foot high mountains have disappeared completely! I know that they are there, but they are absolutely invisible from here. I expect to wake up Monday morning with little change in this stale reality, and likely right on into Tuesday. The increasing Kona winds ahead of the upcoming mid-week cold front, may help to clear out some of the vog, but I’m not promising that now. ~~~ I’m heading out for my evening walk as I finish this update, although I’m going to be taking it easy, as I don’t want to be breathing in too deeply. I hope you have a great Sunday night, and that you will have a chance to check back in then! Aloha for now…Glenn.  

























Interesting: A new scientific paper co-authored by a University of Adelaide researcher reports strong evidence that humans, not climate change, caused the demise of Australia’s mega-fauna — giant marsupials, huge reptiles and flightless birds — at least 40,000 years ago. In a paper published in the journal Science, two Australian scientists claim that improved dating methods show that humans and mega-fauna only co-existed for a relatively short time after people inhabited Australia, adding weight to the argument that hunting led to the extinction of large-bodied species.

According to Professor Richard ‘Bert’ Roberts from the University of Wollongong and Professor Barry Brook from the University of Adelaide, new methods to directly date bones and teeth of extinct species show that mega-fauna fossils and Aboriginal tools do not all date from the same period.

"Debate about the possible cause of these late Pleistocene extinctions has continued for more than 150 years, with scientists divided over whether climate change or the arrival of humans has been responsible for their demise," Professor Brook says. "Australia was colonized during a time when the climate was relatively benign, supporting the view that people, not climate change, caused the extinctions here," he says.

Interesting2: A new analysis of global surface temperatures by NASA scientists finds the past year was tied for the second warmest since 1880. In the Southern Hemisphere, 2009 was the warmest year on record. Although 2008 was the coolest year of the decade because of a strong La Nina that cooled the tropical Pacific Ocean, 2009 saw a return to a near-record global temperatures as the La Nina diminished, according to the new analysis by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York.

The past year was a small fraction of a degree cooler than 2005, the warmest on record, putting 2009 in a virtual tie with a cluster of other years –1998, 2002, 2003, 2006, and 2007 — for the second warmest on record. "There’s always interest in the annual temperature numbers and a given year’s ranking, but the ranking often misses the point," said James Hansen, GISS director. "There’s substantial year-to-year variability of global temperature caused by the tropical El Nino-La Nina cycle.

When we average temperature over five or ten years to minimize that variability, we find global warming is continuing unabated." January 2000 to December 2009 was the warmest decade on record. Looking back to 1880, when modern scientific instrumentation became available to monitor temperatures precisely, a clear warming trend is present, although there was a leveling off between the 1940s and 1970s. In the past three decades, the GISS surface temperature record shows an upward trend of about 0.36 degrees F per decade.

In total, average global temperatures have increased by about 1.5 degrees F since 1880. "That’s the important number to keep in mind," said GISS climatologist Gavin Schmidt. "The difference between the second and sixth warmest years is trivial because the known uncertainty in the temperature measurement is larger than some of the differences between the warmest years." The near-record global temperatures of 2009 occurred despite an unseasonably cool December in much of North America.

High air pressures from the Arctic decreased the east-west flow of the jet stream, while increasing its tendency to blow from north to south. The result was an unusual effect that caused frigid air from the Arctic to rush into North America and warmer mid-latitude air to shift toward the north. This left North America cooler than normal, while the Arctic was warmer than normal.

"The contiguous 48 states cover only 1.5 percent of the world area, so the United States’ temperature does not affect the global temperature much," Hansen said. GISS uses publicly available data from three sources to conduct its temperature analysis. The sources are weather data from more than a thousand meteorological stations around the world, satellite observations of sea surface temperatures, and Antarctic research station measurements.

Other research groups also track global temperature trends but use different analysis techniques. The Met Office Hadley Centre in the United Kingdom uses similar input measurements as GISS, for example, but it omits large areas of the Arctic and Antarctic where monitoring stations are sparse.

Although the two methods produce slightly differing results in the annual rankings, the decadal trends in the two records are essentially identical. "There’s a contradiction between the results shown here and popular perceptions about climate trends," Hansen said. "In the last decade, global warming has not stopped."

Interesting3: The world’s mountainous regions are home to about 800 million people and the source of some of the world’s major rivers. In these regions, runoff is strongly affected by temperature. This suggests that flooding could be quite sensitive to global warming, but there has been some lack of scientific consensus on the effects of temperature variations on floods.

Allamano et al. show that global warming does increase flood risk significantly. The authors analyzed runoff data recorded by 27 stations in the Swiss Alps and used a simple probabilistic model to study how flood risk varies with temperature, precipitation, and elevation in mountainous regions.

The researchers found that large floods have occurred more frequently in recent years than in the past, and they predict that global warming will result in such floods occurring even more often in the future. In particular, they found that if global temperatures increase by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, then large floods that occurred about once every 100 years could occur up to 5 times more often. The research appears in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.