Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Tuesday:
Lihue, Kauai – 82
Honolulu airport, Oahu – 86
Kaneohe, Oahu – 81
Molokai airport – M
Kahului airport, Maui – 87 (record for the date: 89 – 1952)
Kona airport – 82
Hilo airport, Hawaii – 83
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 – 82
Hilo, Hawaii – 77
Haleakala Crater – 54 (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 37 (over 13,500 feet on the Big Island)
Precipitation Totals – The following numbers represent the largest precipitation totals late Tuesday evening:
0.12 Kilohana, Kauai
1.92 Oahu Forest NWR, Oahu
0.00 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.00 Kahoolawe
0.26 Ulupalakua, Maui
0.45 Keahole airport, Big Island
Marine Winds – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing high pressure systems to the northeast and north of the Hawaiian Islands…with a weak cold front/trough to our northwest. Our local winds will be generally light Wednesday and Thursday, although somewhat faster towards the Maui County and Big Island end of the chain.
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 13,500 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 ended November 30th here in the central Pacific…and begins again June 1st.
Aloha Paragraphs
Generally light trade winds, or a little stronger…with
clouds leading to localized showers at times.
Our winds will be generally on the light side, although locally stronger through the rest of the week…into early next week. Glancing at this weather map, we find high pressure systems located to the northeast and north of the Hawaiian Islands…which is the source of our light winds. A weak cold front to our northwest is keeping our local trades from becoming stronger now. The isobars over the ocean show the current light to moderately strong breezes to be out of the east, or even east-northeast. The latest computer model forecasts now show light winds keeping us in a somewhat stagnant atmosphere, with muggy and hazy weather later this week. As a matter of fact, the forecast keeps the trade winds from picking up into more normal realms, moderately strong…until about a week from today…which is somewhat unusual.
Our local winds will remain generally quite light, although locally stronger…the following numbers represent the strongest gusts, along with directions Tuesday evening:
18 mph Port Allen, Kauai – W
18 Honolulu, Oahu – NE
25 Molokai – NE
22 Kahoolawe – ESE
30 Kahului, Maui – NE
18 Lanai Airport – NE
24 South Point, Big Island – NE
We can use the following links to see what’s going on in our area of the north central Pacific Ocean Tuesday night. Looking at this NOAA satellite picture we see variable multi-layered clouds over and around the islands…most of which is the high and middle level clouds. We can use this looping satellite image to see a dissipating counterclockwise rotating upper level low pressure to our east-southeast…moving away to the east. At the same time a weakening cold front to our northwest is sending some high and middle level clouds our way. Lower level cumulus and stratocumulus clouds are dissipating over and around the islands as we get into the night. Checking out this looping radar image shows that despite all the clouds around, showers aren’t all that plentiful, with most of them falling over the nearby ocean…with a few over the windward sides too.
Sunset Commentary: Here in Kihei, Maui at around 530pm Tuesday evening, skies were mostly clear to partly cloudy. There are still quite a few high cirrus streaks around too, which should light up as the sun goes down. If they are still around Wednesday morning, there will be yet another colorful display early then too.
~~~ A rather weak trough of low pressure to our northwest is keeping us from feeling more normal trade winds…which would be stronger this time of year typically. We’ll see lighter than normal winds for the time being. Winds, or should I say breezes from these directions, especially when they come from the southeast…can bring muggy air our way. Southeasterly breezes can put most of the smaller islands in the lee of the Big Island, like a wind shadow. They’re infamous as well for carrying volcanic haze to the smaller islands, from the mouths of the vents on our biggest island. This type of air flow may kick in over the next 2-3 days, and remain in place through the weekend…at least.
Meanwhile, with a moist rather unstable air mass overlying the island through the rest of the week, into early next week…we’ll be in a shower prone state developing with time. When the winds are out of the east, the windward sides will receive these showers, and if the breezes are out of the southeast, the leeward upslope areas will find showers falling during the afternoon to early evening hours. There has been even the slight hinting of a random thunderstorm popping up at some point this weekend. These upcoming and rather interesting weather circumstances will become more clear, and unfold with greater understanding over the next couple of days.
~~~ I'll be back again early Wednesday morning with more weather updates, and a fresh look at what's coming our way soon. I hope you have a great Tuesday night until then! Aloha for now…Glenn.
Interesting: It's like a scene out of a sci-fi movie — thousands, possibly millions, of king crabs are marching through icy, deep-sea waters and up the Antarctic slope. "They are coming from the deep, somewhere between 6,000 to 9,000 feet down," said James McClintock, Ph.D., University of Alabama at Birmingham Endowed Professor of Polar and Marine Biology.
Shell-crushing crabs haven't been in Antarctica, Earth's southernmost continent, for hundreds or thousands, if not millions, of years, McClintock said. "They have trouble regulating magnesium ions in their body fluids and get kind of drunk at low temperatures."
But something has changed, and these crustaceans are poised to move by the droves up the slope and onto the shelf that surrounds Antarctica. McClintock and other marine researchers interested in the continent are sounding alarms because the vulnerable ecosystem could be wiped out, he said.
Antarctic clams, snails and brittle stars, because of adaptation to their environment, have soft shells and have never had to fight shell-crushing predators. "You can take an Antarctic clam and crush it with your hands," McClintock said. They could be the main prey for these crabs, he said. Loss of unique mollusks could jeopardize organisms with disease-fighting compounds, McClintock said.
Sea squirts, for example, produce an agent that fights skin cancer. If the crabs eat them, it could bring McClintock's research with that organism to a halt. McClintock's chemical ecology program has published more than 100 papers on species researchers have discovered, including the compound that combats skin cancer and one to treat flu, that are being explored by drug companies.
"I am very concerned that species could disappear, and we could lose a cure to a disease," he said. McClintock's colleague Sven Thatje, Ph.D., an evolutionary biologist at the University of Southampton in England, saw the first signs of the king crab invasion in 2007. He spotted a lone crab climbing up the slope.
McClintock and Rich Aronson, Ph.D., a paleoecologist at Florida Institute of Technology, put together a proposal to launch the first systematic search for king crabs in Antarctica. With Sven as chief expedition scientist, the team headed back with two ships and a submarine earlier this year.
"We ran transects up the slope and discovered hundreds and hundreds of king crabs, which could translate into millions across broad expanses of coastal Antarctica," he said. "They are adults, males and females. They appear healthy and have all the ingredients needed to produce a healthy population."
The king crabs' large numbers on the slope suggest that they are increasing in number at a rate faster than anticipated, McClintock said. "Before long, they could be in shallow water and on the shelf," he said. "This is a very visual, visceral way of thinking of an impact of climate change."
McClintock and his fellow researchers are exploring causes for the invasion, which they believe is linked to human-induced climate warming. Around 40,000 tourists visit the area each year. "Antarctica has become a popular destination for tourists," McClintock said. Cruise ship companies have seen it as an opportunity to take visitors to "one of the most stunningly beautiful areas on our planet."
After cruising along the waters, tourists can then take a rubber boat called a zodiac to a beach covered with penguins as far as the eye can see. "The penguins will come right up to you," McClintock said. And, now that the king crabs are on the Antarctic slope, some fishermen are anxious to head to Antarctica as well.
McClintock has already gotten an email from a fisherman asking when he can come. But the icy waters and dangerous logistics make fishing difficult, McClintock said. "There is a TV show called the 'The Deadliest Catch,'" he said. "Well this is the deadliest, deadliest catch." For now, McClintock and his team are reviewing the thousands of images they captured during their submarine exploration.
His team is analyzing the data and plans to have its findings published in a major journal within a year. "The whole ecosystem could change," McClintock said. "And this is just one example of a species expanding its range into a new territory. There will certainly be more as the climate warms up."
Interesting2: Battery technology hasn't kept pace with advancements in portable electronics, but the race is on to fix this. One revolutionary concept being pursued by a team of researchers in New Zealand involves creating "wearable energy harvesters" capable of converting movement from humans or found in nature into battery power.
A class of variable capacitor generators known as "dielectric elastomer generators" (DEGs) shows great potential for wearable energy harvesting. In fact, researchers at the Auckland Bioengineering Institute's Biomimetics Lab believe DEGs may enable light, soft, form-fitting, silent energy harvesters with excellent mechanical properties that match human muscle.
They describe their findings in the American Institute of Physics' journal Applied Physics Letters. "Imagine soft generators that produce energy by flexing and stretching as they ride ocean waves or sway in the breeze like a tree," says Thomas McKay, a Ph.D. candidate working on soft generator research at the Biomimetics Lab.
"We've developed a low-cost power generator with an unprecedented combination of softness, flexibility, and low mass. These characteristics provide an opportunity to harvest energy from environmental sources with much greater simplicity than previously possible."
Dielectric elastomers, often referred to as artificial muscles, are stretchy materials that are capable of producing energy when deformed. In the past, artificial muscle generators required bulky, rigid, and expensive external electronics. "Our team eliminated the need for this external circuitry by integrating flexible electronics — dielectric elastomer switches — directly onto the artificial muscles themselves.
One of the most exciting features of the generator is that it's so simple; it simply consists of rubber membranes and carbon grease mounted in a frame," McKay explains. McKay and his colleagues at the Biomimetics Lab are working to create soft dexterous machines that comfortably interface with living creatures and nature in general.
The soft generator is another step toward fully soft devices; it could potentially be unnoticeably incorporated into clothing and harvest electricity from human movement. When this happens, worrying about the battery powering your cell phone or other portable electronics dying on you will become a thing of the past.
And as an added bonus, this should help keep batteries out of landfills.
Interesting3: Unintentional overdose deaths in teens and adults have reached epidemic proportions in the U.S. In some 20 states in 2007 the number of unintentional drug poisoning deaths exceeded either motor vehicle crashes or suicides, two of the leading causes of injury death. Prescription opioid pain medications are driving this overdose epidemic. Opioid pain medications were also involved in about 36 percent of all poisoning suicides in the U.S. in 2007.
In a commentary article released ahead of the print version in the April 19, 2011 online issue of the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, physicians affiliated with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine and Duke University Medical Center cite data noting that in 2007 unintentional deaths due to prescription opioid pain killers were involved in more overdose deaths than heroin and cocaine combined.
The new report was co-authored by CDC medical epidemiologist Leonard J. Paulozzi, MD, MPH; Richard H. Weisler, MD, adjunct professor of psychiatry at UNC and adjunct associate professor of psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center; and Ashwin A. Patkar, MD, associate professor in the psychiatry and behavioral sciences department at Duke University.
More than describing the scope of unintentional prescription opioid overdose deaths, their report is aimed at helping doctors control the problem. Approximately 27,500 people died from unintentional drug overdoses in 2007, driven to a large extent by prescription opioid overdoses.
Dr. Weisler says that to put this in perspective, the number of 2007 U.S. unintentional drug poisoning deaths alone represents tragically about 4.6 times as many deaths as all U.S. fatalities in both Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan from the beginning of both wars through Feb 20, 2011.
Alternatively, the 2007 U.S. unintentional drug poisoning deaths would be equivalent to losing an airplane carrying 150 passengers and crew every day for six months, which clearly would be totally unacceptable from a public health perspective.
The CDC sounded alarms regarding the issue in several reports last year. In June 2010, for example, the agency announced that the 2009 National Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) found that 1 in 5 high school students in the United States have abused prescription drugs, including the opioid painkillers OxyContin, Percocet, and Vicodin.
Opioids are synthetic versions of opium that are used to treat moderate and severe pain. And in June last year the CDC reported that visits to hospital emergency departments involving nonmedical use of prescription narcotic pain relievers has more than doubled, rising 111 percent, between 2004 and 2008.
The authors note various reports citing some key factors linked to the problem: increased nonmedical use of opioids without a prescription "… solely for the feeling it causes" and that medical providers, psychiatrists and primary care physicians included, may fail to anticipate among their patients the extent of overlap between chronic pain, mental illness and substance abuse.
For example, 15 percent to 30 percent of people with unipolar, bipolar, anxiety, psychotic, non-psychotic, and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorders will also have substance abuse problems. Dr. Patkar said, "Similarly, people with substance abuse are more likely to have another mental illness and a significant number of patients with chronic pain will have mental illness or substance abuse problems."
Moreover, opioids, benzodiazepines, anti-depressants, and sleep aids "are frequently prescribed in combination despite their potentially harmful additive effects," the authors point out. And it's the combinations of these drugs that are frequently found in the toxicology reports of people dying of overdoses.
In their recommendations to physicians, the authors suggest that before prescribing opioids, doctors should try non-narcotic medications as well as, when possible, physical therapy, psychotherapy, exercise, and other non-medicinal methods. And that these methods are given "an adequate trial" before moving to opioids.
"It is very important to screen patients with chronic pain who may require opioid therapy for substance abuse and mental health problems, especially depression and other mood and anxiety disorders and address these problems adequately," they state.
Interesting4: Amphibian declines around the world have forced many species to the brink of extinction, are much more complex than realized and have multiple causes that are still not fully understood, researchers conclude in a new report. The search for a single causative factor is often missing the larger picture, they said, and approaches to address the crisis may fail if they don't consider the totality of causes — or could even make things worse.
No one issue can explain all of the population declines that are occurring at an unprecedented rate, and much faster in amphibians than most other animals, the scientists conclude in a study just published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.
The amphibian declines are linked to natural forces such as competition, predation, reproduction and disease, as well as human-induced stresses such as habitat destruction, environmental contamination, invasive species and climate change, researchers said.
"An enormous rate of change has occurred in the last 100 years, and amphibians are not evolving fast enough to keep up with it," said Andrew Blaustein, a professor of zoology at Oregon State University and an international leader in the study of amphibian declines.
"We're now realizing that it's not just one thing, it's a whole range of things," Blaustein said. "With a permeable skin and exposure to both aquatic and terrestrial problems, amphibians face a double whammy," he said. "Because of this, mammals, fish and birds have not experienced population impacts as severely as amphibians — at least, not yet."
The totality of these changes leads these researchers to believe that Earth is now in a major extinction episode similar to five other mass extinction events in the planet's history. And amphibians are leading the field — one estimate indicates they are disappearing at more than 200 times that of the average extinction rate.
Efforts to understand these events, especially in the study of amphibians, have often focused on one cause or another, such as fungal diseases, invasive species, an increase in ultraviolet radiation due to ozone depletion, pollution, global warming, and others.
All of these and more play a role in the amphibian declines, but the scope of the crisis can only be understood from the perspective of many causes, often overlapping. And efforts that address only one cause risk failure or even compounding the problems, the researchers said.
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