Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Tuesday afternoon:
Lihue, Kauai – 76
Honolulu airport, Oahu – 85
Kaneohe, Oahu – 80
Molokai airport – 83
Kahului airport, Maui – 84
Kona airport – 84
Hilo airport, Hawaii – 80
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 – 81F
Hilo, Hawaii – 75
Haleakala Crater – missing (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – missing (under 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 evening:
1.53 Waialae, Kauai
2.06 Lualualei, Oahu
0.00 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.00 Kahoolawe
0.21 Kaupo Gap, Maui
0.98 Glenwood, Big Island
Marine Winds – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a 1040 millibar high pressure system to our north…with a ridge extending down to the north of the islands. At the same time we find low pressure to our north, moving north…with a cold front to our northwest. Our winds will be generally light, although stronger locally…ranging between east to southeast to south through Wednesday.
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
A few heavy showers later tonight…continuing into Thursday
Flash flood watch all islands
Variable winds through mid-week…with possible trade winds returning later Thursday. showing a 1040 millibar high pressure system to our north…with a ridge extending down to the north of the islands. At the same time we find low pressure to our north…with a cold front to our northwest. Our winds will be generally light, although stronger locally through Wednesday. There's a chance we could see the trade winds returning later Thursday.
Winds will be generally light, although locally stronger…the following numbers represent the strongest gusts, along with directions Tuesday evening:
15 mph Barking Sands, Kauai – NE
21 Kahuku, Oahu – NE
06 Molokai – SE
21 Kahoolawe – SE
07 Kahului, Maui – NE
06 Lanai Airport – NW
29 South Point, Big Island – NNE
We can use the following links to see what’s going on in our area of the north central Pacific Ocean Tuesday afternoon. This large University of Washington satellite image shows an upper level low pressure system far to our north, with the bottom part of its trough of low pressure extending into the area northeast of the islands. Looking at this NOAA satellite picture, we see clear to partly cloudy conditions around the state…with some thunderstorms over the ocean to our west. We can use this looping satellite image to see much of the high and middle level clouds having lifted out to the northeast and northwest, although there are still lots of high clouds to the south of and over the Big Island. Checking out this looping radar image, it shows generally dry conditions for the most part over the state, although with some showers having broke out over the interior sections from the Big Island up through Oahu…at the time of this writing.
Hawaii remains under an unsettled weather pattern, with more rain arriving later tonight or by Wednesday, some of which will be heavy into Thursday…with a chance of thunderstorms. The NWS office is keeping the flash flood watch up statewide Tuesday night…through late Wednesday. The NWS is also calling for potentially excessive rainfall through Wednesday night. This of course could lead to flash flood warnings, and localized flooding anywhere in the Aloha state. This is something that we should all be paying close attention to, as it could become rather serious…especially in terms of driving with lots of extra water on our roadways. The official forecast now calls for drier weather with the return of the long lost trade winds later Thursday or by Friday…into the weekend.
~~~ Here in Kihei, Maui at around 530pm Tuesday evening, skies were partly cloudy, consisting mostly of the high cirrus variety. There were some darker and lower cumulus clouds over the mountains too. As noted above, between now and Thursday, we could see quite an impressive rainfall event. I'll keep this looping radar image handy, so we can easily access it when the heavier rainfall finally arrives by Wednesday. I'm about to take the drive back upcountry to Kula, where those low hanging gray clouds are located. I don't think that there were many showers up that way, at least nothing heavy. I expect clouds to gather over the state as we move through Wednesday, so be ready to drive under the influence of locally rainy weather going forward. I'll be back early Wednesday morning with the next new edition of this updated weather narrative. I hope you have a great Tuesday night until then! Aloha for now…Glenn.
Interesting: Life for humans is much easier than for animals in the wild. On a day-to-day basis, we generally do not have to worry about being eaten or starving to death. Depending on the individual's job, some can get by just fine by sitting around all day. However, this lifestyle brings forth its own set of health issues such as diabetes and heart disease, illnesses rarely found in the wild. These "human" diseases have spread to gorillas that are raised in captivity.
The only species of gorilla kept at North American zoos is the Western Lowland Gorilla. The number one killer of males in captivity is heart disease, much like humans. After a 21 year old gorilla named Brooks died of heart failure at Cleveland Metroparks Zoo in 2005, a group of researchers decided to examine how the gorilla’s lifestyle affect their health. The team was led by Elena Hoellein Less, a PhD candidate in biology at Case Western Reserve University.
The researchers believe that heart disease can be stopped by switching captive gorillas back to their natural diets in the wild. For decades, zoos have fed gorillas bucket loads of high vitamin, high sugar, and high starch foods to make sure their got all their nutrients. At the Cleveland zoo, they have started feeding food such as romaine lettuce, dandelion greens, endives, alfalfa, green beans, flax seeds, and even tree branches which they strip of bark and leaves.
To top it off, they give the gorillas three Centrum Silver multivitamins inside half a banana. Going back to this natural diet has changed gorilla behavior. Before, gorillas only ate during a quarter of their day because the food was so packed with nutrients. Now at Cleveland, they spend 50-60 percent of their day eating which is the same amount as in the wild. With all this extra eating, the gorillas have doubled their caloric intake, yet at the same time have dropped 65 pounds each.
This brings their weight more in line with their wild relatives. "We're beginning to understand we may have a lot of overweight gorillas," said Kristen Lukas, an adjunct assistant professor of biology at Case Western Reserve and chair of the Gorilla Species Survival Plan®. "And, we're just recognizing that surviving on a diet and being healthy on a diet are different. We've raised our standards and are asking, are they in the best condition to not only survive but to thrive?"
Less and her crew are continuing their studies of captive gorillas by measuring the fat on their backs to create a gorilla body mass index. This can be used to gauge healthy weight for gorillas much as it is used for humans. The next step, says Less, is to exercise gorillas at the zoo to get their muscles to a similar level as their wild relatives.
Interesting2: More intensive beef production can limit deforestation in Brazil where the space used to rear cattle is ten times what you see in other countries, according to WWF Brazil CEO Denise Hamu. The majority of deforestation in the Amazon is being driven by the spread of cattle ranches with one report estimating that 40 per cent of Brazil's cattle are currently kept within the confines of the Amazon, where illegally occupied forest land is available cheaply.
In total, cattle occupy around 80 per cent of land already in legal use in the Amazon. But speaking to the Ecologist this week, Hamu says 'scaling up' beef production in Brazil would reduce the pressure to clear rainforest.
'This doesn't mean we are going to put them in jail but it means we need to review our productivity parameters and how we can really get into the market without deforesting,' she said. She said protecting against deforestation would only work if it was driven by consumers refusing to buy products that come from unknown sources.
Interesting3: Channeling 2 percent, or $1.3 trillion, of global gross domestic product into greening sectors such as construction, energy and fishing could start a move toward a low-carbon world, a report launched on Monday said. The investment would expand the global economy at the same rate, if not higher, as under present economic policies, said the report by the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP).
"Investing 2 per cent of global GDP into 10 key sectors can kick-start a transition toward a low-carbon world," the Nairobi-based agency said in a statement. "The sum, currently amounting to an average of around $1.3 trillion a year and backed by forward-looking national and international policies, would grow the global economy at around the same rate if not higher than those forecast, under current economic models."
UNEP's Executive Director Achim Steiner said in the statement: "With 2.5 billion people living on less than two dollars a day and with more than two billion people being added to the global population by 2050, it is clear that we must continue to develop and grow our economies. "But this development cannot come at the expense of the very life support systems on land, in the oceans or in our atmosphere."
Agriculture, buildings, energy supply, fisheries, forestry, industry, tourism, transport, waste management and water are sectors that could do with more greening, the report said. Buildings are the single largest emitter of greenhouse gases because of inefficient heating in offices and homes, according to the study entitled "Toward a Green Economy."
Interesting4: Researchers studying the origin of Earth's first breathable atmosphere have zeroed in on the major role played by some very unassuming creatures: plankton. In a paper to appear in the online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Ohio State University researcher Matthew Saltzman and his colleagues show how plankton provided a critical link between the atmosphere and chemical isotopes stored in rocks 500 million years ago.
This work builds on the team's earlier discovery that upheavals in Earth's crust initiated a kind of reverse-greenhouse effect 500 million years ago that cooled the world's oceans, spawned giant plankton blooms, and sent a burst of oxygen into the atmosphere. The new study has revealed details as to how oxygen came to vanish from Earth's ancient atmosphere during the Cambrian Period, only to return at higher levels than ever before.
It also hints at how, after mass extinctions, the returning oxygen allowed enormous amounts of new life to flourish. Saltzman and his team were able to quantify how much oxygen was released into the atmosphere at the time, and directly link the amount of sulfur in the ancient oceans with atmospheric oxygen and carbon dioxide.
The result is a clearer picture of life on Earth in a time of extreme turmoil. "We know that oxygen levels in the ocean dropped dramatically [a condition called anoxia] during the Cambrian, and that coincides with the time of a global extinction," said Saltzman, associate professor of earth sciences at Ohio State. In a paper in the journal Nature just last month, the same researchers presented the first geochemical evidence that the anoxia spread even to the world's shallow waters.
"We still don't know why the anoxia spread all over the world. We may never know," Saltzman said. "But there have been many other extinction events in Earth's history, and with the exception of those caused by meteor impacts, others likely share elements of this one — changes in the balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and oceans."
"By getting a handle on what was happening back then, we may improve our understanding of what's happening to the atmosphere now." Something enabled oxygen to re-enter the oceans and the atmosphere 500 million years ago, and the study suggests that the tiny plant and animal life forms known as plankton were key.
Plankton may be at the bottom our food chain today, but back then, they ruled the planet. There was no life on land at all. And aside from an abundance of trilobites, life in the oceans was not very diverse. Not diverse, that is, until a geologic event that scientists call the Steptoean Positive Carbon Isotope Excursion (SPICE) occurred.
n previous work, Saltzman and his collaborators showed that the SPICE event was caused by the burial of huge quantities of organic matter in ocean sediments, which pulled carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and released oxygen. The more oxygen plankton encounter in their cells, the more selective they become for the light isotope of carbon in carbon dioxide, and absorb it into their bodies.
By studying isotopes in fossilized plankton contained in rocks found in the central United States, the Australian outback, and China, the researchers determined that the SPICE event happened around the same time as an explosion of plankton diversity known as the "plankton revolution." "The amount of oxygen rebounded, and so did the diversity of life," Saltzman explained.
Other researchers have tried to gauge how much oxygen was in the air during the Cambrian, but their estimates have varied widely, from a few percent to as much as 15-20 percent. If the higher estimates were correct, then the SPICE event would have boosted oxygen content to greater than 30 percent — or almost 50 percent richer than today's standard of 21 percent.
This study has provided a new perspective on the matter. "We were able to bring together independent lines of evidence that showed that if the total oxygen content was around 5-10 percent before the SPICE, then it rose to just above modern levels for the first time after the SPICE," Saltzman said. The study has some relevance to modern geo-engineering.
Scientists have begun to investigate what we can do to forestall climate change, and altering the chemistry of the oceans could help remove carbon dioxide and restore balance to the atmosphere. The ancient and humble plankton would be a necessary part of that equation, he added. "When it comes to ancient life, they don't sound as exciting as dinosaurs, but the plankton are critical to this story."
Interesting5: New evidence bolsters the notion that deep saline groundwaters in South Africa's Witwatersrand Basin may have remained isolated for many thousands, perhaps even millions, of years. The study, recently accepted for publication in Chemical Geology, found the noble gas neon dissolved in water in three-kilometer deep crevices.
The unusual neon profile, along with the high salinities and some other unique chemical signatures, is very different from anything seen in molten fluid and gases rising from beneath Earth's crust, according to University of Toronto professor Barbara Sherwood Lollar, who is the Canadian member of the international team that produced the results.
"The chemical signatures also don't match those of ocean water or waters higher up in the Witwatersrand Basin, where as in most regions of the crust ground waters show evidence of mixing with surface waters and are extensively colonized by microorganisms," she said.
"We concluded that the deeper waters were the product of isolation and extensive chemical interaction between water and rock over incredibly long geological time scales." The smoking gun was the ancient basement rock. "We know that this specific neon isotope signature was produced and trapped within the rock at least two billion years ago.
We can still find it there today," Dr. Sherwood Lollar said. "The study shows some of the neon found its way outside of the rock minerals, gradually dissolving into, and accumulating in, fluids in crevices. This could only happen in waters that have indeed been cut off from the surface for extremely long time periods."
The discovery adds yet another dimension to what has only recently been recognized as a truly unique environment. One of these fracture systems contains the deepest known microbial ecosystems on Earth. These are organisms that eke out an existence independent from sunlight on chemical energy that originates from rock.
"These deep microbial communities radically expand our concept of the habitability of the Earth's subsurface and, indeed, our biosphere," said Dr. Sherwood Lollar. "Given that they have a genetic similarity to organisms found at hydrothermal vents, we assume this is not a separate origin of life, but instead these organisms arrived from elsewhere to colonize these rocks in ancient times," she said. "Clearly the long period of isolation affected their evolution. This is one area we hope to explore with continuing research with our microbiology colleagues."
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Blair Thorndike Says:
I sure hope the Elton John shows aren’t too soggy! Lots of people will be wondering about that as we move into Thursday…~~~Hi Blair, yes lets hope that Elton John gets to put on a great show…with dry weather. Aloha, Glenn