Hawaiian Islands Weather details & Aloha Paragraphs / September 5-6, 2014

The trade winds will remain active through the rest of the weekend into the new week…light to moderately strong in general. Here’s the latest weather map, showing the Hawaiian Islands, and the rest of the North Pacific Ocean, along with a real-time wind profile of the central Pacific. We find a weak high pressure system to the west, with the primary high pressure cell far to our northeast. At the same time, there’s a low pressure system, a former tropical cyclone, slowly dissipating to the northeast of Hawaii. Meanwhile, there’s an unseasonably deep, near 975 millibar storm low pressure system far to the northwest.

Satellite imagery shows clear to partly cloudy skies over the islands…with cloudy areas over the islands locally. Looking at this larger looping satellite image, it shows areas of thunderstorms well offshore to the southeast of Hawaii…with associated high cirrus migrating north and northeastward. The light winds locally will prompt afternoon clouds and showers over our leeward upcountry locally. As the trades remain active, the windward sides will receive some incoming showers too. Here’s the looping radar, showing some showers moving across our island chain, which will continue in an off and on manner. In general, there will be little change in our favorably inclined weather conditions through the next five days at least. I’ll be back with more updates on all of the above and below, I hope you have a great Friday night wherever you happen to be spending it! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Friday Evening Film:  This time around I’ve seen most of the new films that were of interest to me, although there’s one that I’ve been considering seeing, it’s called Magic in the Moonlight, starring Eileen Atkins, Colin Firth, Marcia Gay Harden, Hamish Linklater, Simon McBurney, and Emma Stone…among others. The synopsis: Chinese conjuror Wei Ling Soo is the most celebrated magician of his age, but few know that he is the stage persona of Stanley Crawford (Colin Firth), a grouchy and arrogant Englishman with a sky-high opinion of himself and an aversion to phony spiritualists’ claims. Persuaded by his friend, Howard Burkan (Simon McBurney), Stanley goes on a mission to the Côte d’Azur mansion of the Catledge family: mother Grace (Jacki Weaver), son Brice (Hamish Linklater), and daughter Caroline (Erica Leerhsen). He presents himself as a businessman named Stanley Taplinger in order to debunk the alluring young clairvoyant Sophie Baker (Emma Stone) who is staying there with her mother (Marcia Gay Harden). Sophie arrived at the Catledge villa at the invitation of Grace, who is convinced that Sophie can help her contact her late husband, and once there, attracted the attention of Brice, who has fallen for her head over heels. What follows is a series of events that are magical in every sense of the word and send the characters reeling. In the end, the biggest trick MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT plays is the one that fools us all. This film is directed and produced by Woody Allen ~~~ I’ll let you know in the morning about just how entertaining it was, until then…here’s the trainer.


World-wide tropical cyclone activity:

Central Pacific: There are no active tropical cyclones

Here’s a link to the Central Pacific Hurricane Center (CPHC)

Northwest Pacific Ocean: There are no active tropical cyclones

South Pacific Ocean: There are no active tropical cyclones

North and South Indian Oceans: There are no active tropical cyclones

Here’s a link to the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC)


Interesting:  Ozone pollution in India kills crops that could feed starving population – In one year, India’s ozone pollution damaged millions of tons of the country’s major crops, causing losses of more than a billion dollars and destroying enough food to feed tens of millions of people living below the poverty line.

These are findings of a new study that looked at the agricultural effects in 2005 of high concentrations of ground-level ozone, a plant-damaging pollutant formed by emissions from vehicles, cooking stoves and other sources. Able to acquire accurate crop production data for 2005, the study’s authors chose it as a year representative of the effects of ozone damage over the first decade of the 21st century.

Rising emissions are causing severe ozone pollution in some of India’s most populated regions. Pollution in Delhi, the nation’s capital, has reached levels comparable to Beijing, one of the most polluted cities in the world, according to India’s Air Monitoring Center.

The main component of smog, ozone at ground level can cause leaf damage that stifles plant growth, injuring and killing vegetation. There are currently no air quality standards in India designed to protect agriculture from the effects of ground-level ozone pollution, according to the new study. Ground-level ozone is formed when nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and volatile organic compounds react with sunlight after the chemicals’ release from vehicles, industry, or burning of wood or other plant or animal matter.

According to the new study published in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, surface ozone pollution damaged 6.7 million U.S. tons of India’s wheat, rice, soybean and cotton crops in 2005.

India could feed 94 million people with the lost wheat and rice crops, about a third of the country’s poor, according to Sachin Ghude, an atmospheric scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) in Pune, India and lead author of the new study. There are about 270 million Indians that live in poverty, according to the study.

Wheat — one of the country’s major food sources — saw the largest loss by weight of the four crops studied in the new paper, with ozone pollution damaging 3.8 million U.S. tons of the crop in 2005. Another major food source, rice, saw losses of 2.3 million U.S. tons, according to the new study.