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

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

Lihue, Kauai –                    80
Honolulu airport, Oahu –      78 
Kaneohe, Oahu –                76
Molokai airport –                 78
Kahului airport, Maui –         78 
Kona airport –                       81
Hilo airport, Hawaii –           74

Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level – and on the highest mountain tops…as of 6pm Saturday evening:

Barking Sands, Kauai – 78
Hilo, Hawaii – 71

Haleakala Crater –     41 (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 28 (over 13,500 feet on the Big Island)

Here are the 24-hour precipitation totals (inches) for each of the islands as of Saturday evening:

3.67     Kilohana, Kauai
4.52     South Fork Kaukonahua, Oahu
0.36     Molokai
0.00     Lanai
0.00     Kahoolawe
2.24     Puu Kukui, Maui
2.48     Saddle Quarry, Big Island

Marine Winds – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a 1031 millibar high pressure system to the north-northeast of Hawaii. Our local trade winds will become lighter Sunday and Monday…turning to the southeast.

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 shining down during the night at times. Plus, during the nights you will be able to see stars, and the sunrise and sunset 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

Unsettled weather with showers, some locally heavy…
with isolated thunderstorms. Our local winds will
become lighter on Mother's Day into Monday. 
Flash flood watch starting Sunday morning
 
 
 
 

Our winds will remain rather breezy and quite gusty…then becoming lighter later Mother's Day and turning more southeast into the new work week ahead.  Glancing at this weather map, we find a east to west oriented 1031 millibar high pressure system, located to the north-northeast of Hawaii.  The small craft wind advisory remains active across just those windiest areas around the Big Island of Hawaii. The computer models continue to show lighter winds arriving during the day Sunday into Monday…veering to the southeast. It will take until later in the new week for the trade winds to rebound.

Our local winds will blow from the trade wind direction…the following numbers represent the strongest gusts, along with directions Saturday evening:

29                 Port Allen, Kauai – E  
23                 Kahuku, Oahu – ENE 
28                 Molokai – NE   
38                    Kahoolawe – E
32                 Kahului – NE 
06                 Lanai 
37                 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 Saturday night.  Looking at this NOAA satellite picture we find clouds across all of the islands. At the same time we find towering cumulus or even a few thunderstorms, with their heavier showers to our southwest. We can use this looping satellite image to see a stream of high cirrus clouds edging over our islands locally. At the same time we find showery clouds moving over the state from the north.  Checking out this looping radar image shows areas of heavy showers over the ocean just to the south of our islands…with some generous showers moving over Oahu at the time of this writing. 

Friday evening I went to see a new film in Kahului, Maui. There weren't that many films that looked interesting to me, although the new one called Fast Five, had caught my eye, starring Vin Diesel, Paul Walker and Dwayne Johnson…among others. This film is about three guys who get behind the wheel in the latest installment of this blockbuster auto action series. It was wild and fast paced, full of action, that's for sure!.The critics are giving this film a B- grade, while the viewers are giving it an A-…which encourages me to some degree. I found the theater mostly full of kids, actually I surrounded by them where I found myself sitting. It was kind of fun to hear them laughing, and of course they were checking their cell phones often, and texting too. I was entertained by this film, it was super macho, and there were few times when something wasn't getting blown up, or someone wasn't giving someone else a hard look. There were the gals too, all sorts of attractive women parading around with not all that much on. At any rate, I could give this film a B grade, as it lived up to what I thought it would be. Here's the trailer for you, just in case you had the slightest interest in seeing what I was sitting through after work yesterday.

Sunset Commentary: The cold air associated with a nearby area of low pressure is still around this weekend, with warm moist air near the surface…keeping our overlying atmosphere unstable and shower prone. At the same time a moderately strong, trade wind producing high pressure system is located to the north-northeast of our Hawaiian Islands. These features will work together in such a way as to keep the threat of rainfall in the forecast through this Mother’s Day weekend…and even beyond. The colder than normal air aloft will prompt warm moist air to rise up through it, with rain making clouds roaming through the islands. We could easily find flooding periods on any of the islands…which will likely stick around into the first half of the new work week ahead.

The trade winds will remain active, although the small craft wind advisory has been pared back to just the Alenuihaha Channel between Maui and the Big Island…and the Big Island coastal waters in places too. These winds are forecast to weaken and veer to the southeast later this weekend, or certainly by early in the new week. Southeast winds can carry volcanic haze up from the Big Island vents, and put the smaller islands in a wind shadow as well. These lighter winds, in association with the daytime heating of the islands can lead to lots of showers. Looking at the looping radar image just below however, we see that these heavier showers could end up just about anywhere at any time…day or night.

This evening here in Kula, Maui, there's a mix of high, middle and lower level clouds. It isn't raining here at the moment, although there were a few light showers late in the afternoon hours. As we check out this looping radar image, we can see that there's no lack of heavy rainfall in the fairly close proximity. The NWS has issued a flash flood watch starting early Sunday morning, which will last through Monday. This strongly suggests that we are in for locally heavy showers, and even a few more of those late season thunderstorms too.

I went to the Seabury Crafts Fair today in lower Olinda, or upper Makawao…whichever. It was packed with folks walking around buying things in the many, many booths. I was amazed at how many people were there, most of which I'd never seen before. It's interesting to have lived on a fairly small island for over 36 years, and look around at a crowd of people, and not recognize most of them. I did see a few friends, and enjoyed chatting with them for a while. The skies looked threatening, and it was gusty at times, although it didn't rain, which was good. I then drove down to Paia for my weekly food shopping, and brought my groceries back here to Kula. There are lots and lots of dark gray clouds around early this evening, and it feels like it will starting raining soon, although it's not quite there at the time of this writing. I'll come back online a little later if it starts to rain, otherwise I'll be back Sunday morning with your next new weather narrative from paradise. It's still Saturday, although I want to wish all you Mom's a most happy Mother's Day ahead of time!  Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting: Know thyself. That was Socrates' advice, and it squares with conventional wisdom. "It's a natural tendency to think we know ourselves better than others do," says Washington University in St. Louis assistant professor Simine Vazire.

But a new article by Vazire and her colleague Erika N. Carlson reviews the research and suggests an addendum to the philosopher's edict: Ask a friend. "There are aspects of personality that others know about us that we don't know ourselves, and vice-versa," says Vazire.

"To get a complete picture of a personality, you need both perspectives." The paper is published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. It's not that we know nothing about ourselves. But our understanding is obstructed by blind spots, created by our wishes, fears, and unconscious motives — the greatest of which is the need to maintain a high (or if we're neurotic, low) self-image, research shows.

Even watching ourselves on videotape does not substantially alter our perceptions — whereas others observing the same tape easily point out traits we're unaware of. Not surprisingly, our intimates and those who spend the most time with us know us best.

But even strangers have myriad cues to who we are: clothes, musical preferences, or Facebook postings. At the same time, our nearest and dearest have reasons to distort their views. After all, a boorish spouse or bullying child says something to the other spouse or parent.

"We used to collect ratings from parents — and we've mostly stopped, because they're useless," notes Vazire. What such data would show: Everyone's own child is brilliant, beautiful, and charming. Interestingly, people don't see the same things about themselves as others see. Anxiety-related traits, such as stage fright, are obvious to us, but not always to others.

On the other hand, creativity, intelligence, or rudeness is often best perceived by others. That's not just because they manifest themselves publicly, but also because they carry a value judgment — something that tends to affect self-judgment.

But the world is not always the harsher critic. Others tend to give us higher marks for our strengths than we credit ourselves with. Why doesn't all this information add up to better personal and mutual understanding? People are complex, social cues are many, perceptions of others are clouded by our own needs and biases, studies show. Plus, the information isn't easy to access.

"It's amazing how hard it is to get direct feedback," Vazire notes, adding that she isn't advocating brutal frankness at any cost. There are good reasons for reticence. The challenge, then, is to use such knowledge for the good. "How can we give people feedback, and how can that be used to improve self-knowledge?" Vazire asks.

"And how do we use self-knowledge to help people be happier and have better relationships?" The first answer to these questions may be the most obvious, but not the easiest to practice: Listen to others. They may know more than you do — even about yourself.

Interesting2: El Niño and its partner La Niña, the warm and cold phases in the eastern half of the tropical Pacific, play havoc with climate worldwide. Predicting El Niño events more than several months ahead is now routine, but predicting how it will change in a warming world has been hampered by the short instrumental record.

An international team of climate scientists has now shown that annually resolved tree-ring records from North America, particularly from the US Southwest, give a continuous representation of the intensity of El Niño events over the past 1100 years and can be used to improve El Niño prediction in climate models.

The study, spearheaded by Jinbao Li, International Pacific Research Center, University of Hawai'i at Manoa, is published in the May 6 issue of Nature Climate Change. Tree rings in the US Southwest, the team found, agree well with the 150-year instrumental sea surface temperature records in the tropical Pacific.

During El Niño, the unusually warm surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific lead to changes in the atmospheric circulation, causing unusually wetter winters in the US Southwest, and thus wider tree rings; unusually cold eastern Pacific temperatures during La Niña lead to drought and narrower rings.

The tree-ring records, furthermore, match well existing reconstructions of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation and correlate highly, for instance, with δ18O isotope concentrations of both living corals and corals that lived hundreds of years ago around Palmyra in the central Pacific.

"Our work revealed that the towering trees on the mountain slopes of the US Southwest and the colorful corals in the tropical Pacific both listen to the music of El Niño, which shows its signature in their yearly growth rings," explains Li.

"The coral records, however, are brief, whereas the tree-ring records from North America supply us with a continuous El Niño record reaching back 1100 years." The tree rings reveal that the intensity of El Niño has been highly variable, with decades of strong El Niño events and decades of little activity.

The weakest El Niño activity happened during the Medieval Climate Anomaly in the 11th century, whereas the strongest activity has been since the 18th century. These different periods of El Niño activity are related to long-term changes in Pacific climate.

Cores taken from lake sediments in the Galapagos Islands, northern Yucatan, and the Pacific Northwest reveal that the eastern-central tropical Pacific climate swings between warm and cool phases, each lasting from 50 to 90 years.

During warm phases, El Niño and La Niña events were more intense than usual. During cool phases, they deviated little from the long-term average as, for instance, during the Medieval Climate Anomaly when the eastern tropical Pacific was cool.

"Since El Niño causes climate extremes around the world, it is important to know how it will change with global warming," says co-author Shang-Ping Xie. "Current models diverge in their projections of its future behavior, with some showing an increase in amplitude, some no change, and some even a decrease. Our tree-ring data offer key observational benchmarks for evaluating and perfecting climate models and their predictions of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation under global warming."

Interesting3: Chimpanzees are self-aware and can anticipate the impact of their actions on the environment around them, an ability once thought to be uniquely human, according to a study released Wednesday. The findings, reported in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, challenge assumptions about the boundary between human and non-human, and shed light on the evolutionary origins of consciousness, the researchers said.

Earlier research had demonstrated the capacity of several species of primates, as well as dolphins, to recognize themselves in a mirror, suggesting a fairly sophisticated sense of self. The most common experiment consisted of marking an animal with paint in a place — such as the face — that it could only perceive while looking at its reflection.

If the ape sought to touch or wipe off the mark while facing a mirror, it showed that the animal recognized itself. But even if this test revealed a certain degree self-awareness, many questions remained as to how animals were taking in the information. What, in other words, was the underlying cognitive process?

To probe further, Takaaki Kaneko and Masaki Tomonaga of the Primate Research Institute in Kyoto designed a series of three experiments to see if chimps, our closest cousins genetically, to some extent "think" like humans when they perform certain tasks.

Interesting4: Renewable energy sources like solar and wind only generate electricity when the wind blows or the sun is out and that isn't always when customers need power. Batteries large enough to hold megawatts of electricity are prohibitively expensive but another potential source of battery storage is fast emerging: electric vehicles. Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) storage allows the smart grid to use EVs (and even hybrids) as a distributed network of batteries that can store power at off-peak times and help power the grid when demand peaks.

Here’s how it works:

1. Power is generated from a renewable source, like wind, and transferred to the grid.

2. Electricity flows from the grid to EV batteries when there is excess capacity (e.g. when the wind blows in predawn hours). The power flow is reversed when demand on the grid is higher.

3. Customers can control when the smart grid can access battery power from their EVs, which can put out enough power to run 10 houses, and even control how far the battery is discharged.