Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Thursday afternoon:
Lihue airport, Kauai – 76
Honolulu airport, Oahu – 79
Kaneohe, Oahu – 81
Molokai airport – 75
Kahului airport, Maui – 83
Kona airport – 81
Hilo airport, Hawaii – 85
Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level – and on the highest mountain tops…as of 5pm Thursday evening:
Hilo, Hawaii – 79
Lihue, Kauai – 75F
Haleakala Crater – missing (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 41 (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 evening:
2.94 Mount Waialeale, Kauai
0.25 Hawaii Kai, Oahu
0.10 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.00 Kahoolawe
0.49 Kaupo Gap, Maui
0.22 Pohakuloa Keamuku, Big Island
Marine Winds – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a 1027 millibar high pressure system far to our northeast. At the same time we find a gale low pressure system just to our northwest, with its cold front moving through our islands. Our winds will be increasing somewhat from the south, then north later Friday…northeast Saturday.
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 ends November 30th here in the central Pacific.
Aloha Paragraphs
Increasing showers tonight into Friday
An approaching cold front will keep local winds blowing from the south to southwest Thursday night…and then swing them around to the north later Friday. This weather map shows a 1027 millibar high pressure system far to our northeast. Winds will blow from the south and southwest ahead of this cold front. Cool northerly winds will come in over the state in the wake of the cold front, becoming stronger and gusty trade winds this weekend. Winds will calm down and veer back to the southeast on Monday or Tuesday.
Winds will remain generally on the light side, although locally a bit stronger than that…the following numbers represent the strongest gusts, along with directions early Thursday evening:
17 mph Port Allen, Kauai – SW
18 Wheeler AFB, Oahu – SSW
08 Molokai – SSE
10 Kahoolawe – SW
09 Kahului, Maui – SW
07 Lanai Airport – SW
15 South Point, Big Island – NE
We can use the following links to see what’s going on in our local skies Thursday night. This large University of Washington satellite image shows lots of rainy looking clouds over the ocean to our north and west…along with the approaching cold front hidden under those clouds at the time of this writing. Looking at this NOAA satellite picture, we see quite a few lower level clouds, many of which are bearing showers. We can use this looping satellite image to see that there are high and middle level clouds coming our way from the west. The associated cold front continues to push in our direction from the northwest. Checking out this looping radar image, it shows light to moderately heavy showers over the ocean to our south and southwest…these will arrive over the islands at times tonight into Friday, some of which may be briefly heavy.
The cold front will reach Kauai tonight, then Oahu and Maui Friday…and perhaps the Big Island Friday night or early Saturday. As the front gets closer, our overlying air mass is becoming more shower prone…with prefrontal showers or rain falling on many of the smaller islands already. We’ll find showers increasing as the cold front sweeps through. A mention of thunderstorms needs to remain in the forecast for later in the weekend. As the northeast winds return this weekend, whatever moisture is left around then, will stream back over the islands. As the winds veer around to the southeast again later Monday or Tuesday, we should see diminishing showers, although some may continue to impact the south and east facing coasts and slopes.
The expected weather change, associated with the approaching cold front…is happening now. Tonight will find showers arriving at times locally, most notably along our leeward coasts and slopes. Some of these showers will make their way over into the north and east facing slopes and shores too. At the time of this writing there are showers streaming through the Kauai Channel, a couple of which are quite heavy. Most of the islands of Maui County and the Big Island were mostly outside of these arriving prefrontal showers. This incoming moisture will eventually work its way down the chain, with Molokai probably the first to get wet. Showing this looping radar image again will draw our attention to these showers, which will become rain at times into Friday. As the cool north winds arrive in the wake of the frontal passage, showers will then concentrate their efforts more fully along the north sides, although many areas will receive showers…even the leeward sides. It appears that this off and on showery reality will continue right on through the weekend.
The necessary ingredients continue to come together now, to ensure the arrival of wet weather conditions, which are already happening on Kauai and Oahu. Maui County will see showers arriving more fully going forward. The north sides of the Big Island should see some showers too, although just how far the cold front will be able to progress in that direction is still in question. All of the islands however will get into this rain dance once the winds turn north and northeast…carrying lots of moisture over us on those sides…and even the leeward sides again this weekend too. ~~~ Here in Kihei, Maui before I head back upcountry, our atmosphere is quite moisture laden, and volcanically hazy too. It seems about as cloudy and rainy as it can be without actually having started to rain…you know what I mean? At any rate, I'll be back dark and early Friday morning with your next new weather narrative from paradise, even if it is a little rainy! Aloha for now…Glenn.
Extra: Slow motion kitten video
Interesting: No single weather event can be directly attributed to climate change. But as the globe warms up, Americans can expect more storms like the one bearing down on much of the United States, scientists say.
That's not because the Feb. 1 storm can be linked to rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels or increasing global temperature – again, such a connection is impossible to make – but, according to climatologists, an increased propensity for winter storms is exactly what you'd expect in a warming world.
"There's no inconsistency at all," Michael Mann, the director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center, told LiveScience. "If anything, this is what the models project: that we see more of these very large snowfalls."
Climate versus weather
Questions about climate often pop up when the weather is extreme. Droughts and heat waves trigger comments on the scourge of carbon dioxide. During winter storms like the one currently lashing much of the East and Midwest, skeptics question why they have to dig out their car from snowdrifts in a supposedly warming world.
Pinning climate change angst on a single weather system makes no sense, climatologists say. "Climate is the statistics of weather over the long term," Ken Caldeira, a senior scientist at the Carnegie Institute for Science at Stanford University, told LiveScience. "No specific weather event can by itself confirm or disprove the body of scientific knowledge associated with climate change."
Instead, Mann said, climate change is like a pair of loaded dice. If you erase the 5 on one side of a die and replace it with a 6, you'll roll twice as many 6s. There's no way of knowing which of those 6s you would have rolled without loading the die, just as there's no way of knowing which hurricane would have fizzled without climate change. In the long term, though, the global warming trend becomes clear. "Climate change is an intrinsic part now of every roll of the die," Mann said. "We've stacked the odds."
Stronger storms
But stacked the odds for what? Models suggest the answer is bigger storms. Warmer air in the atmosphere can hold more moisture, Mann said, and the condensation of that moisture puts more energy into storm systems. "It's sort of a double whammy," Mann said. "The storms become more powerful and they contain more moisture."
In the United States storms might track a bit more northward, and the East Coast might see more Nor'easters, Mann said. North America isn't going to get so warm that snow disappears, he said, and when cold air hits extra-moist air, snowfalls are likely to get larger. Some research has suggested that global warming could fuel bigger thunderstorms as well.
There's still a lot of noise in the data that needs to be sorted out before climatologists can predict localized weather effects from climate change, said Rutgers University professor David Robinson, who is the state climatologist of New Jersey. "How many major floods do we have to have in a 20-year period before we say, 'Well, that's unprecedented'? And then you have to ask, 'But could it still happen naturally?'" Robinson said. "That could take years. That could take decades."
Slow and steady
Robinson is currently looking into whether severe winter weather has changed over the past century. He and his colleagues are analyzing records of major winter snowfalls. "The tricky part is we could actually have the snow signal temporarily hidden by the fact that you could have some larger snows that would keep your annual averages commensurate with what they had been in the past, even though change is occurring," Robinson said.
"So you have to look at the change in the way the snow is falling, not necessarily the quantity of snow." All of this work takes time, Robinson said. Major changes will become apparent more quickly, he said, while subtle signals may take half a century to detect. "Meteorologists get instant gratification or instant disdain," Robinson said. "The one thing that is required of climatologists is patience."
Interesting2: Space weather is the concept of changing environmental conditions in near-Earth space. It is distinct from the concept of weather within a planetary atmosphere, and deals with phenomena involving ambient plasma, magnetic fields, radiation and other matter in space.
"Space weather" often implicitly means the conditions in near-Earth space within the magnetosphere and ionosphere, but it is also studied in interplanetary (and occasionally interstellar) space. The primary source of these changes is what happens on the Sun. Changes in the near-Earth space environment affect our society.
The best known ground-level consequence of space weather is geo-magnetically induced currents, or GIC. These are damaging electrical currents that can flow in power grids, pipelines and other conducting networks and cause disruptions and black outs.
Eight years ago, the American Meteorological Society tentatively reached out to the space weather community by scheduling a day-and-a-half Space Weather Symposium at its Annual Meeting. That symposium included briefings from operational and research agencies involved with space weather as well as a variety of talks targeting areas of interest common to meteorology and space weather.
Since 1995, the joint NASA-ESA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory spacecraft is the main source of near-real time solar data for space weather prediction. It was joined in 1998 by the NASA Advanced Composition Explorer, which carries a space weather beacon for continuous transmission of relevant in situ space environment data.
A variety of physical phenomena are associated with space weather, including geomagnetic storms and substorms, energization of the Van Allen radiation belts, ionospheric disturbances and scintillation, aurora and geomagnetically induced currents at Earth's surface.
Coronal mass ejections and their associated shock waves are also important drivers of space weather as they can compress the magnetosphere and trigger geomagnetic storms. Solar energetic particles, accelerated by coronal mass ejections or solar flares, are also an important driver of space weather as they can damage electronics on board spacecraft through induced electric currents.
Most times space weather cannot be observed by the average person. This does not mean it does not exist and could have effects on daily life. The most visual affected phenomena are the aurora borealis or northern lights. However really bad space weather could affect cell phone use or any other signal transmitted through the air.
Topics at the annual conference include data assimilation, connections between the lower and upper atmosphere, new space weather sensors and models, and the economic and social impacts of space weather. The Council is to vote on making the space weather discipline a regular part of the society by creating a new Space Weather Committee for the Scientific and Technological Activities Commission. The affects of space weather on modern society are gradually becoming more important and may lead to space weather forecasting on a regular basis.
Interesting3: Shark attacks went up last year — the highest amount of attacks seen worldwide in a decade, researchers say. The spike in attacks is most likely due to the growth of the human population, coupled with the increasingly large amount of time people spend in the sea, which raises the odds of human-shark interactions.
Scientists investigated 115 alleged incidents of struggles between humans and sharks worldwide in 2010. They confirmed that 79 of these were unprovoked shark attacks on live humans. Unprovoked attacks are ones that occurred with the predators in their natural habitats without human instigation.
The other 36 incidents included 22 provoked attacks — such as assaults after divers grabbed sharks — including three cases of sharks biting boats, four incidents dismissed as non-shark attacks, five scavenging incidents of human corpses and two cases where there was not enough information to determine if an unprovoked shark attack had occurred.
Where sharks attack
This 2010 total of 79 unprovoked shark attacks was higher than the 63 unprovoked attacks in 2009, and the highest since 80 attacks in 2000. As in recent years, North American waters had the most unprovoked attacks in 2010 at 32 (or 42 percent of the total).
Florida had most of the unprovoked attacks in the United States at 13, although this was the lowest total since a dozen incidents were documented in 2004 and fell well below the 2001 to 2010 average of 23.1. Unprovoked assaults elsewhere include: 14 in Australia, eight in South Africa, six in Vietnam and six in Egypt.
Single incidents were also noted in the Bahamas, Brazil, Fiji, Madagascar, Mascarene Islands, Solomon Islands, Canary Islands, Tonga and the United Arab Emirates. Vietnam and Egypt had unusually high numbers of attacks this year, said George Burgess at the University of Florida in Gainesville, curator of the International Shark Attack File.
While he could not speak to why Vietnam experienced so many attacks, his trip to Egypt revealed there had been illegal offshore dumping of sheep guts as well as overt feeding of fish that lured sharks into the area, which helped lead to subsequent attacks. Also, water temperatures there were unusually high, which might have somehow put the sharks on edge, Burgess suggested.
Six fatalities from unprovoked attacks occurred in 2010, which was only slightly above the yearly average of 4.3 fatalities from 2001 to 2010. Two happened in South Africa, while the others were lone cases that happened in Egypt, Australia, Florida and California.
This unprovoked attack fatality rate of 7 percent between 2001 and 2010 was lower than the 13 percent seen in the 1990s, likely reflecting advances in beach safety practices, medical treatment and public awareness of avoiding potentially dangerous situations.
Growing trend?
While the number of unprovoked shark attacks has grown at a steady pace over the past century (and developments such as the Web have now given the public the ability to report attacks, increasing the awareness of such assaults), the rise in attacks might not necessarily be indicative of a growing trend.
"There are ups and downs from year to year that are motivated by a large number of factors — oceanographic conditions, meteorological conditions, as well as social and economic conditions, and all combined lead to variations annually," Burgess told LiveScience.
In fact, despite this recent spike, the number of shark attacks worldwide has generally leveled off in the last decade, averaging 63.5 per year since 2000. There were fewer tourists in the water due to economic troubles after 9/11 and the recent global recession, and also because of tropical storms that battered the East Coast of the United States.
People might also generally be getting smarter about reducing their interactions with sharks, while there are also fewer sharks in the water due to worldwide overfishing of them. "Although my heart goes out to the families of those who die from shark attacks, if you step back, the number of fatalities from shark attacks are very, very low compared to the number of hours people spend at sea," Burgess said.
"Meanwhile, people are killing 30 million to 70 million sharks per year." If you are ever attacked by a shark, researchers advise that one should fight back, as sharks respect size and power. Hitting a shark on the nose — ideally with an inanimate object — typically results in the shark temporarily reining in its attack, and you should then try to get out of the water if at all possible.
If not, repeatedly banging the shark's snout might temporarily dampen the attack, but will likely become increasingly less effective. If a shark actually bites, researchers suggest clawing at its eyes and gills, which are two sensitive areas. "When you enter the sea, remember that it's not like going into a pool — this is a wilderness experience," Burgess said.
"It's the equivalent of taking a trek in the Outback or the Amazon or the Serengeti. You're entering a world we're not very well-equipped for. Still, we get away with bumbling around in there fairly readily."
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