Hawaiian Islands Weather details & Aloha paragraphs / December 22-23, 2011

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

Lihue, Kauai –                   78
Honolulu airport, Oahu –    83  (record high temperature for the date…87F degrees – 1995)
Kaneohe, Oahu –               78
Molokai airport –                79
Kahului airport, Maui –        80  
Kona airport –                     83
Hilo airport, Hawaii –          79

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

Barking Sands, Kauai – 80
Princeville, Kauai – 72

Haleakala Crater – 46 (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea –        27 (near 13,800 feet on the Big Island)

Hawaii’s Mountains – Here’s a link to the live web cam on the summit of near 13,800 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. Here's the Haleakala Crater webcam on Maui…which is working only sometimes lately.

 Aloha Paragraphs

Strong and gusty trade winds, a few passing showers
Small craft wind advisories statewide…high
surf advisory east shores all islands
 

As this weather map shows…we have a near 1029 millibar high pressure system located far to the northeast of the Hawaiian Islands Thursday evening.  This high pressure cell has a ridge that runs southwest from its center, into the area north of the state. At the same time, we find a surface trough of low pressure to the southwest of the islands, which is helping to enhance the strength of our local trade wind speeds. These trade winds are expected to continue through the rest of this Christmas holiday week…into the first part of next week at least.

The following numbers represent the strongest wind gusts (mph), along with directions Thursday evening:

31                 Lihue, Kauai – NE
33                 Waianae Valley, Oahu – ESE
36                 Molokai – NE
46                    Kahoolawe – E
37                 Kahului, Maui – NE
39                 Lanai – NE
42                    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 Thursday evening.  Looking at this NOAA satellite picture we find that the high and middle level clouds are located to the south through east of the islands at this hour. We can use this looping satellite image to see towering cumulus and thunderstorms developing over the ocean to the southwest through south-southeast of the Big Island. Checking out this looping radar image we see showers over the ocean, light of which are light to moderately heavy, with only a few coming into our windward sides. 

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

1.33               Kilohana, Kauai
0.58               Oahu Forest NWR, Oahu
0.01               Molokai
0.00               Lanai
0.00               Kahoolawe
2.20               Puu Kukui, Maui
5.07                 Saddle Quarry, Big Island

Sunset Commentary:  The local trade winds were slightly, ever so slightly lighter today than they have been this week so far. The last several days have seen winds peaking out near 50 mph in at least one place, on the small island of Lanai in Maui County. There have been gusts regularly well up into the upper 30 mph range, with lots of lower to middle 40 mph around in other places too. Today we find that the winds may have, slacked-off perhaps 5 mph in general…although were still gusting up into the lower to middle 40 mph range in Maui County early this evening.

The high pressure system to our northeast has weakened a little, while a new high pressure system to our northwest will be taking over duty. This transition has prompted a very slight reduction in the trade wind speeds, although at the same time, we continue to see no end in sight for these winds into early next week. Looking a bit further ahead, we should see a more noticeable weakening of our long lasting trade wind speeds as we move through the remaining days of next week…leading up to the New Years festivities. We don’t want our winds to slack-off completely however, as we could see problems with fireworks smoke on New Years eve if that happened.

Rainfall has definitely backed off today, and looks to be only normal for the time being. Oahu’s received some decent showers over the last several days, although those eastern islands have had by far the most plentiful rainfall. There are still some showers around, although if we glance that this looping radar image, we see that the majority of the showers are over the ocean, with not all that many in sight at the time of this writing. As the winds are still so strong, we will continue to see occasional passing showers being carried our way…most notably along our windward sides however.

The NWS office in Honolulu continues to call for more passing shower activity through the weekend, so we’ll see if these showers actually do get fired-up again as we move into our Christmas holiday period. The summits on the Big Island have had some snow falling periodically the last few days, although the winter weather advisory has been pulled now. Nonetheless, as this Mauna Kea webcam shows, there's still some of the white stuff up topside…viewable during the daylight hours.

Here in Kihei, Maui at around 530pm HST, it was mostly clear, with just light trades up here off the beaches. As noted above, the weather elements causing our gusty winds are still in place tonight. The recent wet weather however is taking a break, and hopefully will relax its hold on the windward sides, at least to some extent through the holiday weekend coming up. We'll have to refine this as we move through this extended period.  ~~~ I'm heading out for the drive back upcountry to Kula now, and will be back very early Friday morning, at which point I'll have more to say about the wind conditions, and whether our more favorably inclined rainfall conditions will hold firm for a while longer. I hope you have a great Thursday night until then! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting:   We use a staggering 2 million plastic bottles every five minutes in the United States, the large majority of which are PET plastic. And our rate of recycling is worse than dismal: not quite 13 percent nationwide. Glimmers of hope are emerging. In states with mandatory recycling laws, the recycling rates are almost 28 percent for PET plastic. Only 10 states have the so-called “bottle bills,” yet those states have the highest rate of recycling in the country.

Of these, two made major headway in 2010: California reached 82 percent recycling; and Washington state achieved an overall recycling rate of 49 percent. It begs the question: What would happen if the rest of the country implemented similar laws? Plastic is a large expense in the beverage industry. The global price of oil directly affects the type of plastic being produced.

In 2008, when the price of oil soared to more than $100 per barrel, companies began scrambling to find alternatives to plastic bottles. Enter bioplastics. Several companies have created bottles made from plant-based materials. Coca-Cola Company launched its Dasani PlantBottle, made with up to 30 percent plant-based material, and its Odwalla brand PlantBottle, made with 100 percent PLA (polylactide or polylactic acid), a polymer made from renewable plant materials.

Another beverage company to make the switch is Nature’s Bottles. Its PLA bottles are made from Ingeo, a purportedly non-GMO, corn-based material that is touted as the world’s first biopolymer to show a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. PLA is fairly unique, says Mike Centers, executive director of BioCor, a northern California-based recycler of PLA.

You can recycle it relatively inexpensively compared to PET and other plastics, he says. And it can be made into useful products such as clamshells (traditional throwaways) and even beer cups. All the beer cups at the Oakland Coliseum stadium are made from PLA.

Centers launched BioCor in 2010 to help create a market and an infrastructure for collecting plant-based waste material, both industrial and post consumer. According to research firm Pira International, nearly half of all bioplastic packaging in the world is PLA. The market for the material is thriving, says Centers. Bioplastics is a high-growth industry. In fact, manufacturers want to use PLA to develop secondary markets, Centers adds.

Coca-Cola took “an innovative approach” with the Dasani PlantBottle, says Centers. It took one of the chemicals that make up PET and found a way to derive it from plants instead. “They’ve captured the imagination of what everyone’s trying to do but haven’t gotten there yet,” Centers says. HDPE (high density polyethylene) is a petroleum-based plastic, one of the most common types of plastic products found today.

Both HDPE and PET types of plastics are moving towards being plant based, says Centers. But it all depends on the price of oil. If oil is high, Centers says, more manufacturers will convert to PLA as a packaging source. One company that recently announced it is jumping onto this bandwagon is PepsiCo. Earlier this year, the giant beverage manufacturer revealed its plans to market a 100 percent plant-based PET bottle.

It had examined the possibility of using PLA but found that it did not meet the company’s needs. There is definitely a bright future for PLA. It can be recycled as easily as PET plastic, and it takes only 27 to 50 days for it to break down in industrial composting facilities.