Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Wednesday:
Lihue, Kauai – 84
Honolulu airport, Oahu – 88 (record high for the date – 91 in 1979)
Kaneohe, Oahu – 82
Molokai airport – 86
Kahului airport, Maui – 88 (record high for the date – 93 in 1951)
Kona airport 85
Hilo airport, Hawaii – 84
Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level – and on the highest mountain tops…as of 5pm Wednesday evening:
Honolulu, Oahu – 83
Kaneohe, Oahu – 77
Haleakala Crater – 48 (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea Summit – 39 (over 13,500 feet on the Big Island)
Here are the 24-hour precipitation totals (inches) for each of the islands as of Wednesday afternoon:
0.29 Mount Waialeale, Kauai
0.35 Kaneohe MCBH, Oahu
0.15 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.00 Kahoolawe
0.43 Puu Kukuki, Maui
0.41 Kapapala Ranch, Big Island
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 during the daytime hours, and is referred to as a Close-up visible image. 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. This web cam is 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. The Haleakala Crater webcam on Maui just came back online, after being on the blink for several weeks.
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. A satellite image, which shows the entire ocean area between Hawaii and the Mexican coast…can be found here. Here's a tropical cyclone tracking map for the eastern and central Pacific.
Aloha Paragraphs
Trade wind weather pattern
Our trade winds will gradually become lighter through Friday morning…then increase again briefly. Glancing at this weather map, it shows a strong 1037 millibar high pressure system far to our north-northwest, with two weaker 1021 millibar high pressure cells to our northeast. There's an elongated cold front coming off the mainland west coast, which runs southwest and west to near the International Dateline. We’ll be in a slightly lighter wind flow through Friday morning. This will occur due to the cold front pushing our trade wind producing ridge down closer to the Aloha state. The trade winds will increase again temporarily later in the day Friday and Saturday, pushing the cold front down into the state then. A slightly cooler air mass will over-ride the state in the wake of this frontal passage…through Saturday night. As a second cold front approaches from the north and northeast…our winds will grade into lighter southerly breezes ahead of that second cold front arriving around Tuesday or Wednesday of next week.
Trade winds continue…the following numbers represent the strongest gusts (mph), along with directions Wednesday evening:
23 Port Allen, Kauai – E
21 Kahuku, Oahu – NE
21 Molokai – NE
27 Kahoolawe – ESE
27 Kapalua, Maui – NE
08 Lanai – NNE
24 Upolu 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 Wednesday evening. Looking at this NOAA satellite picture we find just a few low clouds generally offshore of the islands…although they are being carried over the islands locally. We can use this looping satellite image to see those low clouds moving along in the trade wind flow. There's a new area of high level clouds located offshore, to the west and southwest of the islands….heading our way. Checking out this looping radar image we see just a few showers over the ocean, impacting the islands in places.
Sunset Commentary: The forecast out through the next week looks to be pretty well settled on, although the second cold front of this period, arriving around next Tuesday or Wednesday…may still need a bit of fine tuning over the next several days. While we’re noting cold fronts, the first of these two will be on our doorstep at some point between Friday evening into Saturday morning. These two early season frontal passages will have the most important bearing on our local weather conditions here in the islands during the next seven days.
In terms of precipitation, both of these cloud bands will likely bring some moisture with them, depending upon how well they hold together, as they push into the tropics. Besides the intensities of these showers, it will depend upon whether either of them begins to fall apart as it grades into our island area. As is often the case, perhaps Kauai and Oahu would have the greatest chance of seeing rainfall. It of course depends upon exactly which direction the fronts get carried our way, from the northwest, north or northeast. Since we haven’t had much moisture falling lately, it would be good to see all the islands get a little precipitation.
As far as winds go, they will be going through their changes, in both the approach and departure of these fronts. For the time being the trade winds will slow down some now, as the first front weakens our trade wind producing high pressure ridge. Then, as the first front goes through, we’ll see a slightly cool surge of trade wind in its wake. These northeast breezes won’t last long however, as the second front approaches…they will swing around to the east or even south. The latest computer model output now suggests that this second front may stall before arriving…lets hold this lightly for the next day or so.
Here in Kihei, Maui at around 530pm HST Wednesday evening, skies were clear to partly cloudy, with the trade winds blowing. The weather here in the islands will remain quite nice through most of Friday, with generally light to locally moderate trade winds gracing the islands. There will be those typical showers falling here and there, although generally over and around the windward sides and the lower mountains on the smaller islands. As I just mentioned above, that second cold front next week now looks like it may be a no show. We still have several more days that we can see if the forecast models change their minds. There will be no doubt however that last nights full moon will be doing its thing again tonight, which will be a bright one. I'm heading upcountry to Kula now, and will meet you here dark and early Thursday morning, or at least my next new weather narrative will be ready for the reading then, using Hawaii Standard Time. I hope you have a great Wednesday night until then! Aloha for now…Glenn.
Extra: Rover journey on Mars
Interesting: The latest victim of climate change could well be something we all take for granted. It is delicious, ubiquitous, and most people cannot think of dessert without it. The International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) recently released a report that states that chocolate will soon become a luxury item that a few can afford. Various reports in the past have been leading up to this same fact.
Unsustainable cultivation and labor practices in West Africa (where most cocoa is grown) are often cited as reasons for decline in chocolate production.
This report however, warns that chocolate is a heat-sensitive crop and even an increase of 2.3ºC in West Africa, "will render many of the region's cocoa-producing areas too hot for the plants that bear the fruit from which chocolate is made."
This region produces about 70% of the world's cocoa. Earlier this year hundreds of millions of trees were destroyed in an attempt to contain a virus. Areas growing cacao trees in the Amazon basin have been falling victim to fungal infections.
The Mars candy company is joining USDA to sequence the cacao's genome before the fungal blight reaches West Africa. The world's increasing appetite for chocolate is partially to blame, as farmers are planting cacao trees in marginal areas to satisfy demand.
This leads to weaker trees which are more susceptible to disease. As farmers in Brazil start abandoning cacao farming, they take up more lucrative occupations like logging.
Crops like palm-oil and rubber also have bigger financial reward than cocoa farming, which leads some farmers to burn forests for pasture and farmland and abandon them when the nutrients in the soil are used up.
Interesting2: Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have directly determined the surface temperature of early Mars for the first time, providing evidence that's consistent with a warmer and wetter Martian past.
By analyzing carbonate minerals in a four-billion-year-old meteorite that originated near the surface of Mars, the scientists determined that the minerals formed at about 18 degrees Celsius (64 degrees Fahrenheit). "The thing that's really cool is that 18 degrees is not particularly cold nor particularly hot," says Woody Fischer, assistant professor of geobiology and coauthor of the paper, published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on October 3. "It's kind of a remarkable result."
Knowing the temperature of Mars is crucial to understanding the planet's history — its past climate and whether it once had liquid water. The Mars rovers and orbiting spacecraft have found ancient deltas, rivers, lakebeds, and mineral deposits, suggesting that water did indeed flow. Because Mars now has an average temperature of -63 degrees Celsius, the existence of liquid water in the past means that the climate was much warmer then. But what's been lacking is data that directly points to such a history. "There are all these ideas that have been developed about a warmer, wetter early Mars," Fischer says. "But there's precious little data that actually bears on it." That is, until now.
The finding is just one data point — but it's the first and only one to date. "It's proof that early in the history of Mars, at least one place on the planet was capable of keeping an Earthlike climate for at least a few hours to a few days," says John Eiler, the Robert P. Sharp Professor of Geology and professor of geochemistry, and a coauthor of the paper. The first author is Itay Halevy, a former postdoctoral scholar who's now at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.
To make their measurement, the researchers analyzed one of the oldest known rocks in the world: ALH84001, a Martian meteorite discovered in 1984 in the Allan Hills of Antarctica. The meteorite likely started out tens of meters below the Martian surface and was blown off when another meteorite struck the area, blasting the piece of Mars toward Earth. The potato-shaped rock made headlines in 1996 when scientists discovered tiny globules in it that looked like fossilized bacteria. But the claim that it was extraterrestrial life didn't hold up upon closer scrutiny. The origin of the globules, which contain carbonate minerals, remained a mystery.
"It's been devilishly difficult to work out the process that generated the carbonate minerals in the first place," Eiler says. But there have been countless hypotheses, he adds, and they all depend on the temperature in which the carbonates formed. Some scientists say the minerals formed when carbonate-rich magma cooled and crystallized. Others have suggested that the carbonates grew from chemical reactions in hydrothermal processes. Another idea is that the carbonates precipitated out of saline solutions. The temperatures required for all these processes range from above 700 degrees Celsius in the first case to below freezing in the last. "All of these ideas have merit," Eiler says.
Finding the temperature through independent means would therefore help narrow down just how the carbonate might have been formed. The researchers turned to clumped-isotope thermometry, a technique developed by Eiler and his colleagues that has been used for a variety of applications, including measuring the body temperatures of dinosaurs and determining Earth's climate history.
In this case, the team measured concentrations of the rare isotopes oxygen-18 and carbon-13 contained in the carbonate samples. Carbonate is made out of carbon and oxygen, and as it forms, the two rare isotopes may bond to each other — clumping together, as Eiler calls it. The lower the temperature, the more the isotopes tend to clump. As a result, determining the amount of clumping allows for a direct measurement of temperature.
The temperature the researchers measured — 18 ± 4 degrees Celsius — rules out many carbonate-formation hypotheses. "A lot of ideas that were out there are gone," Eiler says. For one, the mild temperature means that the carbonate must have formed in liquid water. "You can't grow carbonate minerals at 18 degrees other than from an aqueous solution," he explains. The new data also suggests a scenario in which the minerals formed from water that filled the tiny cracks and pores inside rock just below the surface. As the water evaporated, the rock outgassed carbon dioxide, and the solutes in the water became more concentrated. The minerals then combined with dissolved carbonate ions to produce carbonate minerals, which were left behind as the water continued to evaporate.
Could this wet and warm environment have been a habitat for life? Most likely not, the researchers say. These conditions wouldn't have existed long enough for life to grow or evolve — it would have taken only hours to days for the water to dry up. Still, these results are proof that an Earthlike environment once existed in at least one particular spot on Mars for a short time, the researchers say. What that implies for the global geology of Mars — whether this rock is representative of Martian history or is just an isolated artifact — is an open question.
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