Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs / February 7-8, 2011

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

Lihue airport, Kauai –         77
Honolulu airport, Oahu –     81
Kaneohe, Oahu –               74
Molokai airport –                81
Kahului airport, Maui –       84
Kona airport –                   81
Hilo airport, Hawaii –         78

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

Kailua-kona – 79
Kaneohe, Oahu – 73F

Haleakala Crater –     missing (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – missing (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 Monday evening:

1.59 Hanalei River, Kauai  
2.48 Makaha Stream, Oahu
0.57 Molokai 
0.16 Lanai
0.00 Kahoolawe
0.46 Kula, Maui
1.36 Pohakuloa Keamuku, Big Island

Marine Winds – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a very strong 1042 millibar high pressure system far to our northeast, with a high pressure ridge extending southwest just to the northeast of the Big Island. Meanwhile, a cold front has stalled near Kauai and Oahu…with another weak high pressure system following behind. Our winds will be east Tuesday, then veering around to the southeast 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

Large surf north and west shores 

Northeast to easterly trade winds will prevail Monday night…gradually becoming more east Tuesday. This weather map shows a very strong 1042 millibar high pressure system far to our northeast. This high pressure cell has an associated ridge of high pressure extending to the northeast of the Big Island. As the cold front dissipates tonight over Kauai and Oahu, our winds will become trade winds Tuesday. Winds will swing around to the southeast again by mid-week, becoming south to southeast through much of the rest of the week thereafter…bringing volcanic haze back up over the smaller islands.

Winds will be light tonight, although locally stronger…the following numbers represent the strongest gusts, along with directions early Monday evening:

25 mph        Port Allen, Kauai – E
12              Waianae, Oahu – NW  
00              Molokai 
20              Kahoolawe – E
13              Kahului, Maui – NE
00              Lanai Airport – West         
25                South Point, Big Island – NE

We can use the following links to see what’s going on in our local skies. This large University of Washington satellite image shows an incredible amount of clouds to our north. At the same time we find high and middle level clouds streaking down over us in places…along with lower level clouds around too. Looking at this NOAA satellite picture, it shows what left of the dissipating cold front over Kauai and Oahu…in a ragged form. We can use this looping satellite image to see lots of high and middle level clouds streaming by, generally from west to east. At the same time we are seeing lower level cumulus and stratocumulus moving east to west…in the returning trade wind flow.  Checking out this looping radar image, it shows a fair amount of showers coming into the state, especially over Oahu…which will continue in places during the night.

In sum: the cold front has stalled as expected, and is dissipating on the Kauai end of the island chain. There will still be quite a few clouds around tonight, along with some showers too. There continues to be quite a bit of haze in our local skies, and will be until the winds become more fully trades on Tuesday. Showers are falling generally over the ocean, with some of those are light to moderately heavy, according to radar loops. The interior areas on Maui and the Big Island saw a showery afternoon in places. The winds are coming in from the east now, and will continue through Tuesday. The computer models show another cold front approaching the state by mid-week, which will veer our winds around to the southeast again then. As we saw recently, southeast winds bring volcanic haze up from the Big Island, over the smaller islands. The models suggest this cold front will not reach the islands later in the week, although there is still a question in that regard.

~~~ The high surf warnings and advisories remain in effect tonight, and will very likely remain in place through Tuesday. Everyone should be using caution when getting near the ocean's edge on our north and west facing beaches. The surf will lower a little beginning Wednesday through Friday, and then come up again from the northerly direction this coming weekend. Speaking of surf, there may be an out of season small south swell arriving on Wednesday, lasting for a day to two.

~~~ It's foggy here in Kula, Maui at 535pm, with an air temperature of 64.9F degrees. I worked from home today and had the good fortune to have showers falling most of the afternoon. I'm heading out for a walk now, and will be back early Tuesday morning with your next new weather narrative from paradise. I hope you have a great Monday night until then! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting: A pipeline rupture in Iran has caused a 20-kilometer oil slick along the shores of the Gulf, the semi-official Mehr news agency reported on Sunday. The spill was caused by an explosion in a corroded pipeline at the port city of Daylam in Bushehr province, Mehr said.

"The pipeline blast and the subsequent discharge of crude oil has created large spills in the sea, some of which stretch 12 miles along the shoreline going 5 miles into the sea," said Amir Sediqi, a local official of the Environmental Organization.

The report did not say how much oil was lost or when the leak started. The Oil Ministry was not immediately available to comment. Stormy weather was hampering clean-up efforts, Sediqi said. Some 40 percent of the world's traded crude oil passes through the Gulf and oil extraction and conflicts have posed a significant threat to the marine environment.

Interesting2: The Year of the Tiger in the Chinese lunar calendar has come to an end, having yielded big results for its namesake — an unprecedented swell of public and government support to save tigers in the wild, including a historic global recovery program. The International Tiger Forum, held in St. Petersburg, Russia in November 2010 marked the first time an international summit was convened to focus on a single, non-human species.

The Forum produced the Global Tiger Recovery Program (GTRP), a collaboration between the 13 countries that still have wild tigers. It has set a goal of doubling wild tigers by the next Year of the Tiger in 2022. "The recovery program is a big boost for tigers," said Mike Baltzer, Head of WWF's Tigers Alive Initiative.

"But it is only the beginning. We must now join the tiger countries and our partners worldwide to ensure the momentum from the Forum and this past year's tiger conservation achievements continues. Tigers have already run out of time. The recovery must not lose steam."

Wild tiger numbers are down to only 3,200, with scattered populations across 13 countries having lost more than 93 percent of their historic range. Just 100 years ago, an estimated 100,000 tigers roamed across Asia.

Interesting3: University of British Columbia researchers estimate that fisheries catches in the Arctic totaled 950,000 tons from 1950 to 2006, almost 75 times the amount reported to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) during this period. Led by Prof. Daniel Pauly, the research team from UBC's Fisheries Centre and Dept. of Earth and Ocean Sciences reconstructed fisheries catch data from various sources — including limited governmental reports and anthropological records of indigenous population activities — for FAO's Fisheries Statistical Area 18, which covers arctic coastal areas in northern Siberia (Russia), Arctic Alaska (the U.S.) and the Canadian Arctic.

The Arctic is one of the last and most extensive ocean wilderness areas in the world. The extent of the sea ice in the region has declined in recent years due to climate change, raising concerns over loss of biodiversity as well as the expansion of industrial fisheries into this area. The details are published this week in the journal Polar Biology.

"Ineffective reporting, due to governance issues and a lack of credible data on small-scale fisheries, has given us a false sense of comfort that the Arctic is still a pristine frontier when it comes to fisheries," says lead author Dirk Zeller, a senior research fellow at UBC's Fisheries Centre.

"We now offer a more accurate baseline against which we can monitor changes in fish catches and to inform policy and conservation efforts." Official FAO data on fish catches in Area 18 from 1950 to 2006 were based solely on statistics supplied by Russia and amounted to 12,700 tons. The UBC team performed a detailed analysis and found that it's only the tip of iceberg.

The team shows that while the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service's Alaska branch currently reports zero catches to FAO for the Arctic area, the state agency, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game has collected commercial data and undertaken studies on 15 coastal communities in the Alaskan Arctic that rely on fisheries for subsistence.

The estimated fish catch during this period in Alaska alone totaled 89,000 tons. While no catches were reported to FAO by Canada, the research team shows commercial and small-scale fisheries actually amounted to 94,000 tons in catches in the same time span. Meanwhile, Russia's total catch was actually a staggering 770,000 tons from 1950 to 2006, or nearly 12,000 tons per year.

"Our work shows a lack of care by the Canadian, U.S. and Russian governments in trying to understand the food needs and fish catches of northern communities," says Pauly, who leads the Sea Around Us Project at UBC. Researchers from the Sea Around Us Project have previously shown a trend of fish stocks moving towards polar regions due to the effects of climate change.

This, coupled with increased accessibility of the Arctic areas due to melting sea ice, will place immense pressure on the region for future large-scale fisheries. "This research confirms that there is already fishing pressure in this region," says Pauly. "The question now is whether we should allow the further expansion of fisheries into the Arctic."

"Conservation efforts in the Arctic have so far focused on the exploitation of marine mammals — seals and polar bears are frankly easy on the eye and plain to see," says Zeller. "None of them would survive, however, if we allow over-exploitation of fish in this delicate but so-far neglected ecosystem."

Interesting4: Surprising new evidence which overturns current theories of how humans colonized the Pacific has been discovered by scientists at the University of Leeds, UK. The islands of Polynesia were first inhabited around 3,000 years ago, but where these people came from has long been a hot topic of debate amongst scientists.

The most commonly accepted view, based on archaeological and linguistic evidence as well as genetic studies, is that Pacific islanders were the latter part of a migration south and eastwards from Taiwan which began around 4,000 years ago.

But the Leeds research — published February 3 in The American Journal of Human Genetics — has found that the link to Taiwan does not stand up to scrutiny. In fact, the DNA of current Polynesians can be traced back to migrants from the Asian mainland who had already settled in islands close to New Guinea some 6-8,000 years ago.

The type of DNA extracted and analysed in this kind of study is that stored in the cell's mitochondria. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is passed down the maternal line, providing a record of inheritance which goes back thousands of years. The scientists look for genetic signatures which enable them to classify the DNA into different lineages and then use a 'molecular clock' to date when these lineages moved into different parts of the world.

Lead researcher, Professor Martin Richards, explains: "Most previous studies looked at a small piece of mtDNA, but for this research we studied 157 complete mitochondrial genomes in addition to smaller samples from over 4,750 people from across Southeast Asia and Polynesia. We also reworked our dating techniques to significantly reduce the margin of error.

This means we can be confident that the Polynesian population — at least on the female side — came from people who arrived in the Bismarck Archipelago of Papua New Guinea thousands of years before the supposed migration from Taiwan took place." Nevertheless, most linguists maintain that the Polynesian languages are part of the Austronesian language family which originates in Taiwan.

And most archaeologists see evidence for a Southeast Asian influence on the appearance of the Lapita culture in the Bismarck Archipelago around 3,500 years ago. Characterised by distinctive dentate stamped ceramics and obsidian tools, Lapita is also a marker for the earliest settlers of Polynesia.

Professor Richards and co-researcher Dr Pedro Soares (now at the University of Porto), argue that the linguistic and cultural connections are due to smaller migratory movements from Taiwan that did not leave any substantial genetic impact on the pre-existing population.

"Although our results throw out the likelihood of any maternal ancestry in Taiwan for the Polynesians, they don't preclude the possibility of a Taiwanese linguistic or cultural influence on the Bismarck Archipelago at that time," explains Professor Richards. "In fact, some minor mitochondrial lineages back up this idea.

It seems likely there was a 'voyaging corridor' between the islands of Southeast Asia and the Bismarck Archipelago carrying maritime traders who brought their language and artefacts and perhaps helped to create the impetus for the migration into the Pacific.

"Our study of the mtDNA evidence shows the interactions between the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific was far more complex than previous accounts tended to suggest and it paves the way for new theories of the spread of Austronesian languages."