Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs / September 28-29, 2010

September 28-29, 2010

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

Lihue airport, Kauai –  85
Honolulu airport, Oahu –  86
Kaneohe MCAS, Oahu –  84
Molokai airport – 84
Kahului airport, Maui – 86
Ke-ahole airport (Kona) –   85
Hilo airport, Hawaii –   84

Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level – and on the highest mountain tops…as of 5pm Tuesday evening:

Barking Sands, Kauai – 83
Molokai airport – 79 

Haleakala Crater –    50 (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 43 (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 Tuesday afternoon: 

0.02 Hanalei River, Kauai  
0.19 Oahu Forest NWR, Oahu
0.01 Molokai 
0.00 Lanai
0.00 Kahoolawe
0.04 Ulupalakua, Maui
0.22 Waikoloa, Big Island

Marine Winds – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a high pressure system far to the north of our islands. At the same time, we find a frontal cloud band moving slowly southward. Our local winds will remain light Wednesday and Thursday.

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 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. Of course, as we know, our hurricane season won’t end until November 31st here in the central Pacific.

 Aloha Paragraphs

Lots of surf around the Hawaiian Islands now
Artist…Belinda Leigh
 
    

Winds will be on the light side, remaining this way through Thursday…then picking up Friday onwards.  A deep winter time like 977 millibar gale low pressure system remains active far to the north of the Hawaiian Islands Tuesday night. This weather map shows this area, along with a cold front draping down from another low pressure to our northeast…offshore from northern California. This cold front is located just to the north of our islands at the time of this writing. This front will sag down over us early Wednesday morning into the day. The most notable influence at this point will be its ability to keep our local winds subdued. This will keep the convective weather pattern over us, leaving us in a light wind condition…which will continue through Thursday. As we move into Friday and the weekend, we should see the trade winds strengthening some…on into early next week.

As the winds remain on the light side, we’ll see a combination of leeward daytime sea breezes, and light trade winds brushing the windward sides. Meanwhile, this early season cold front will arrive Wednesday, bringing an increase in clouds, and modest localized showers for several days. As the trade winds pick up Friday, they will keep some light showers falling along the windward sides of the islands into the weekend. The overlying atmosphere remains rather dry and stable however, so that whatever showers that do manage to fall, will be on the light side. The low level clouds brought into the state by the cold front, may end up adding some enhancement to the afternoon convective cloud buildups along the leeward slopes both Wednesday and Thursday.

It’s Tuesday evening as I begin writing this last section of today’s narrative update. As implied above, the trade winds remain light to non-existent at the moment. This reality will last into Thursday and perhaps even early Friday…before strengthening trade winds return. The cold front will bring some increase in clouds and showers to Kauai and Oahu, gradually working its way down to Maui County, and maybe even the Big island late Wednesday or early Thursday morning. As I was mentioning this morning, this is yet another example of the changes that we’re starting to go through as we dig deeper into our new autumn season. I find this all very interesting, and will be looking forward to seeing this early season frontal cloud band…dropping down into the state of Hawaii Wednesday. It will be almost completely clear until the frontal clouds arrive. I’ll be back early in the morning with more news on this event, and will look forward to catching up with you again then! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting: Ultra-thin solar cells can absorb sunlight more efficiently than the thicker, more expensive-to-make silicon cells used today, because light behaves differently at scales around a nanometer (a billionth of a meter), say Stanford engineers. They calculate that by properly configuring the thicknesses of several thin layers of films, an organic polymer thin film could absorb as much as 10 times more energy from sunlight than was thought possible.

In the smooth, white, bunny-suited clean-room world of silicon wafers and solar cells, it turns out that a little roughness may go a long way, perhaps all the way to making solar power an affordable energy source, say Stanford engineers. Their research shows that light ricocheting around inside the polymer film of a solar cell behaves differently when the film is ultra thin.

A film that’s nanoscale-thin and has been roughed up a bit can absorb more than 10 times the energy predicted by conventional theory. The key to overcoming the theoretical limit lies in keeping sunlight in the grip of the solar cell long enough to squeeze the maximum amount of energy from it, using a technique called "light trapping.

"It’s the same as if you were using hamsters running on little wheels to generate your electricity — you’d want each hamster to log as many miles as possible before it jumped off and ran away. "The longer a photon of light is in the solar cell, the better chance the photon can get absorbed," said Shanhui Fan, associate professor of electrical engineering.

The efficiency with which a given material absorbs sunlight is critically important in determining the overall efficiency of solar energy conversion. Fan is senior author of a paper describing the work published online this week by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Graphic shows a schematic diagram of a thin film organic solar cell showing the top layer, a patterned, roughened scattering layer, in green. The organic thin film layer, shown in red, is where light is trapped and electrical current is generated. The film is sandwiched between two layers that help keep light contained within the thin film. Credit: Stanford University.

Interesting2: Scotland should produce enough renewable electricity to meet all its power demand by 2025, First Minister Alex Salmond said Tuesday. "Scotland has unrivalled green energy resources and our new national target to generate 80 percent of electricity needs from renewables by 2020 will be exceeded by delivering current plans for wind, wave and tidal generation," Salmond said.

"I’m confident that by 2025 we will produce at least 100 percent of our electricity needs from renewables alone, and together with other sources it will enable us to become a net exporter of clean, green energy," he said a statement ahead of a renewable energy investment conference.

Last week, Scotland raised its 2020 renewable electricity target from 50 to 80 percent of total demand, much of which is expected to be met by offshore wind despite costs soaring over the last few years.

The sparsely-populated part of northern Britain is expected to export much of the low-carbon electricity produced by its existing onshore wind farms and planned offshore projects south to England, which has lagged behind most of Europe in green energy growth.

Interesting3: The Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) PS1 telescope has discovered an asteroid that will come within 4 million miles of Earth in mid-October. The object is about 150 feet in diameter and was discovered in images acquired on September 16, when it was about 20 million miles away. It is the first "potentially hazardous object" (PHO) to be discovered by the Pan-STARRS survey and has been given the designation "2010 ST3."

"Although this particular object won’t hit Earth in the immediate future, its discovery shows that Pan-STARRS is now the most sensitive system dedicated to discovering potentially dangerous asteroids," said Robert Jedicke, a University of Hawaii member of the PS1 Scientific Consortium, who is working on the asteroid data from the telescope. "This object was discovered when it was too far away to be detected by other asteroid surveys," Jedicke noted.

The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics is a major partner in the Consortium. Most of the largest PHOs have already been catalogued, but scientists suspect that there are many more under a mile across that have not yet been discovered. These could cause devastation on a regional scale if they ever hit our planet. Such impacts are estimated to occur once every few thousand years.

Timothy Spahr, director of the Minor Planet Center (MPC), said, "I congratulate the Pan-STARRS project on this discovery. It is proof that the PS1 telescope, with its Gigapixel Camera and its sophisticated computerized system for detecting moving objects, is capable of finding potentially dangerous objects that no one else has found."

The MPC, located in Cambridge, Mass., was established by the International Astronomical Union in 1947 to collect and disseminate positional measurements for asteroids and comets, to confirm their discoveries, and to give them preliminary designations.

Pan-STARRS expects to discover tens of thousands of new asteroids every year with sufficient precision to accurately calculate their orbits around the sun. Any sizable object that looks like it may come close to Earth within the next 50 years or so will be labeled "potentially hazardous" and carefully monitored.

NASA experts believe that, given several years warning, it should be possible to organize a space mission to deflect any asteroid that is discovered to be on a collision course with Earth. Pan-STARRS has broader goals as well. PS1 and its bigger brother, PS4, which will be operational later in this decade, are expected to discover a million or more asteroids in total, as well as more distant targets such as variable stars, supernovas, and mysterious bursts from galaxies across more than half the universe. PS1 became fully operational in June 2010.