Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs / December 23-24, 2010

December 23-24, 2010

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

Lihue airport, Kauai –       missing
Honolulu airport, Oahu –   80
Kaneohe, Oahu –             80
Molokai airport –              80
Kahului airport, Maui –      82
Kona airport –                   83
Hilo airport, Hawaii –        81

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

Honolulu, Oahu – 79F
Lihue, Kauai – 75

Haleakala Crater –    46 (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 34 (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 Thursday afternoon:

0.39 Mount Waialeale, Kauai  
0.64 Nui Valley, Oahu
0.21 Molokai 
0.07 Lanai
0.56 Kahoolawe
1.12 Kaupo Gap, Maui
3.97 Pohakuloa Keamuku, Big Island

Marine Winds – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map shows a strong 1038 millibar high pressure system far to our north, with another high pressure cell far to our east-northeast, offshore from the northern Baja coastline. At the same time, we also have a weak trough of low pressure over the Big Island end of the island chain Thursday night. The placement of these high and low pressure features will keep our winds light, coming in from the southeast direction for the time being.

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 web cam 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 web cams 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

  Clear Friday morning, clouds/showers in the afternoon…locally 

Winds will be generally light…becoming south to southwest later this weekend. This weather map shows a strong 1038 millibar high pressure system far to our north, with another high pressure cell far to our east-northeast, offshore from the northern Baja coastline. At the same time, we also have a weak trough of low pressure over the Big Island end of the island chain Thursday night. The placement of these high and low pressure features will keep our winds light, coming in from the east-northeast to southeast directions for the time being. Our winds will likely shift to the southerly direction later on Christmas Day…then south to southwest Sunday into early in the new week ahead. 

Winds remain generally light…the following numbers represent the strongest breezes early Thursday evening:

13 mph       Lihue, Kauai
18                Waianae, Oahu
07              Molokai
04              Kahoolawe
07              Lipoa, Maui
06              Lanai Airport
14              South Point, Big Island 

The threat of showers over the islands continues, although should hold off until Friday afternoon…for the most part. This large view satellite image shows a large swath of clouds well to our west, along with lots of thunderstorms from our northeast to southeast…raining heavily over the ocean. Looking at this next satellite picture, shows patches of what look like moderate to heavy showers closer into our vicinity. The air mass remains shower prone, and may crop up again during the day Friday. Checking out this looping radar image we see a few moderately heavy showers still in our area, although they are quickly losing steam.  Thursday night into Friday morning has a good chance that shower activity will remain limited.

The overlying atmosphere remains moist and shower prone…as noted above. The rains picked up greatly during the afternoon hours today, particularly on the Big Island and Maui…and to a lesser extent on Oahu. We certainly aren’t done with rainfall, although it should back off some over the next few days. Looking ahead, there's more of this wet stuff on the horizon, coming up as soon as later Sunday into Monday and Tuesday. Until then, we’ll continue to see showers, perhaps most generous of which will be over and around the mountains. As we move into the Christmas weekend, a cold front will push our way, triggering south or even southwesterly Kona winds in the process. We may slide through most of Christmas Day with just a few showers, although by later Sunday into early next week, we may have another heavy rainfall event…especially for Kauai and Oahu! 

As noted in the paragraphs above, we're still involved with an unsettled weather pattern here in the islands. I heard thunder outside here in Kihei, Maui Thursday afternoon, which of course means that there had been lightning to spark those rumbles. This indicates that our atmosphere is unstable, and obviously moist. As was the case Thursday morning, conditions often are the best during the morning hours, before the daytime heating of the islands triggers those afternoon showers or rain. You may have noticed that I wrote about a Hydrologic Outlook Statement, put out by the NWS forecast office in Honolulu…in one of the paragraphs above. This implies that locally heavy rains and flash flooding is possible early in the new week ahead. The greatest threat will be for Niihau, Kauai and Oahu, at least to start off with, as a strong cold front pushes into the state. It wouldn't surprise me however, if this rainfall were to slide down over Maui County and the possibly the Big Island with time too! 

Since I don't work tomorrow, I'm going to see a film this evening, this time the new Harry Potter one, called Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows – Part I, starring Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint…among many others. Harry, Ron, and Hermione set out on a perilous mission to track down the secret to Voldemort's destruction…the Horcruxes. This film is two and a half hours long, so I'll be in the theatre quite a while! I've been meaning to see this film, and somehow it just seems like the right time. Here's a trailer in case you're curious. I'll be back Friday morning with both my impressions of the film, and of course with your next new weather narrative, discussing in depth the Christmas holiday conditions, and then the big rains coming up early in the new week. I hope you have a great Thursday night until then! Aloha for now…Glenn.  

Looping radar image

Interesting: They'll drill through four ice ages, epic sandstorms, humankind's migration from Africa to the New World, and the biggest droughts in history. Tel Aviv University is heading an international study that for the first time will dig deep beneath the Dead Sea, 500 meters (about a third of a mile) down under 300 meters (about a fifth of a mile) of water.

Drilling with a special rig, the researchers will look back in time to collect a massive amount of information about climate change and earthquake patterns. The study, led by Prof. Zvi Ben-Avraham of Tel Aviv University's Minerva Dead Sea Research Center, "aims to get a complete record in unprecedented resolution — at one year intervals — of the last 500 thousand years," says Prof. Ben-Avraham.

A crazy sandstorm 365,250 years ago?

Looking at the core sample to be dug about five miles offshore near Ein Gedi, the researchers hope to pinpoint particular years in Earth history to discover the planet's condition. They'll be able to see what the climate was like 365,250 years ago, for instance, or determine the year of a catastrophic earthquake.

This is by far the largest Earth sciences study of its kind in Israel. The evidence will help the world's climatologists calibrate what they know about climate change from other geological samples — and may lead to better predictions of what's in store for Middle East weather.

For example, are currently increasing dry and hot periods in the region something new, or are they part of some larger cyclical pattern? What they find should also shed light on earthquake patterns — important information for Israelis, Jordanians and Palestinians who live on or around the fault line that passes through the Dead Sea region.

Slicing through a geological cake

"The sediments provide an 'archive' of the environmental conditions that existed in the area in its geological past," Prof. Ben-Avraham says. While the sample being collected isn't as deep as oil explorers drill to look for oil, the core will be something special: it will be kept in an unbroken piece so that records can be traced more accurately.

The study is being supported by the Israel Sciences Academy and includes dozens of scientists from America, Germany, Switzerland, Norway, Japan, and Israel. Scientists from Jordan and the Palestinian Authority are also cooperating on this unique event. The researchers come from a variety of disciplines, from environmental science to chemistry, and each will get different parts of the core to analyze.

Prof. Ben-Avraham himself is particularly interested in chemical changes to the sediment in the Dead Sea over the last half million years. The study, he adds, will shed light on human migration patterns through the region. At 423 meters, or a quarter of a mile, below sea level, the Dead Sea is the lowest place on earth. Today it draws millions of tourists from around the world to enjoy its legendarily healing properties.

Interesting2: Six years after the tsunami disaster of 26/12/2004, the set-up of the German-Indonesian Tsunami Early Warning System for the Indian Ocean (GITEWS) has been completed. The project ends on 31 March 2011. After that, Indonesia accepts the sole responsibility for the overall system.

"The innovative technical approach of GITEWS is based on a combination of different sensors, whose central element is a fast and precise detection and analysis of earthquakes, supported by GPS measurements," says Professor Reinhard Hüttl, Scientific Director of the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences.

"The GFZ-developed evaluation of Seismology via the SeisComP3 system proved to be so fast and reliable that it has now been installed in over 40 countries." A tsunami warning takes place no more than five minutes after a submarine earthquake, based on all the available information from the 300 stations that were built throughout Indonesia in the past 6 years.

These include seismometers, GPS stations, tide gauges and buoy systems. Via a tsunami-simulation system, the information is converted into a situation map providing the appropriate warning levels for the affected coastline. A key outcome of GITEWS project is, however, that the buoy systems do not contribute to this process that occurs in these first few minutes.

There are therefore considerations to shift the GITEWS buoys further into the open ocean and to use them to verify an ocean-wide tsunami that could threaten other countries bordering the Indian Ocean. The Mentawai quake on 25 October this year, however, also showed the limits of any tsunami warning.

The tsunami caused by the earthquake strongly affected the upstream Pagai islands in the Sunda Arc. The first waves arrived around the same time as the triggered tsunami alert, 4 minutes 46 seconds after the quake, and demanded some 500 lives. Several teams of tsunami experts from Japan, Indonesia, Germany and the USA noted in a follow-up analysis that the warning had arrived on the islands, but there had been no time to react.

For the main island of Sumatra with the larger cities of Padang and Bengkulu, the time between the warning and the arrival of the first waves amounted to about 40 minutes, but in this case the Pagai Islands acted as a perfect shield against a tsunami reaching the coast of Sumatra.

The important conclusion is that even with the extremely short premonition times off Indonesia, the GITEWS system has proven to be technically and organizationally functional. Since September 2007, four tsunami events were detected and warnings were issued for each. Especially the inhabitants of the off-shore islands, however, need to receive intensified and improved training on how to act when threatened.

This includes not only the correct response during a tsunami alert, but also the correct behavior before, during and after earthquakes. Immediately after the disaster of 26 December 2004, the Federal Government of Germany contracted the Helmholtz Association, represented by the Helmholtz Centre Potsdam — GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, to develop and implement an early warning system for tsunamis in the Indian Ocean.

The funds to the amount of 45 million euros are a contribution of the Federal Government from the aid-for-flood-victims pool. A natural phenomenon like the tsunami of 2004 cannot be prevented, and such disasters will continue to claim victims, even with a perfectly working alarm system. But the repercussions of such a natural disaster can be minimized with an early warning system. This is the aim of GITEWS.

Interesting3: Using gene sequencing tools, teams from Harvard, the University of Illinois and the University of York in Britain have shown that instead of being the same species — as scientists have long believed — the African savanna elephant and the smaller African forest elephant are distant cousins, having been largely separated for 2 million to 7 million years. "What our study suggests is forest and savanna elephants are very distantly related to each other and not just subspecies or populations of the same species," said Alfred Roca of the University of Illinois, who worked on the study published in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Biology.

The teams compared the genetic code of modern elephants from Africa and Asia to DNA taken from two extinct species — the woolly mammoth and the American mastodon. "The surprising finding is that forest and savanna elephants from Africa — which some have argued are the same species — are as distinct from each other as Asian elephants and mammoths," David Reich of Harvard Medical School in Boston, who worked on the study, said in a statement. Africa's forest and savanna elephants are vastly different in size.

The savanna elephant is roughly double the weight of the forest elephant at six to seven tons and measures about 11.5 feet tall at the shoulder — about 3 feet (1 meter) taller than the forest elephant. Even so, many scientists had thought the two populations of elephants came from the same species, in part because they mated and produced offspring.

Not so, says Professor Michi Hofreiter, an expert in ancient DNA from York. "The divergence of the two species took place around the time of the divergence of the Asian elephant and woolly mammoths," Hofreiter said in a statement.