Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures (F) were recorded across the state of Hawaii Monday…along with the minimum temperatures Monday:

84 – 71  Lihue, Kauai
83 – 74  Honolulu, Oahu
79 – 68  Molokai AP
81 – 69  Kahului, Maui
83 – 70  Kailua Kona
80 – 65  Hilo, Hawaii

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

1.21  Waialae, Kauai
0.11  Wheeler AAF, Oahu
0.03  Molokai
0.00  Lanai
0.15  Kahoolawe
0.95  Ulupalakua, Maui
0.86  Pali 2, Big Island


The following numbers represent the strongest wind gusts (mph)…as of Monday evening:


29  Lihue, Kauai – SW
29  Kahuku Trng, Oahu – SW
32  Molokai – SW
23  Lanai – SW
22  Kahoolawe – SE
38  Kahalui AP, Maui – SW
32  Ahumoa, Big Island – SE


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.



Aloha Paragraphs

 http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/goes/west/cpac/ir4.jpg
Cold front advancing through the Hawaiian Islands

http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/goes/west/hi/ir4.jpg
The leading edge of a cold front has reached Kauai, heading
towards Oahu and Maui County…and then the Big Island


http://radar.weather.gov/Conus/RadarImg/hawaii.gif
Scattered light to moderately heavy showers over parts of the islands…
locally heavier



~~~ Hawaii Weather Narrative ~~~

 

High Wind Warning…Big Island Summits – west winds 60-80+ mph
through Wednesday

Small Craft Advisory…for winds and rough seas – statewide

High Surf Warning…along most north and west facing shores /
High Surf Advisory…west shore of the Big Island


Blustery winds from the southwest…with wind related advisories. Here’s the latest weather map, showing the Hawaiian Islands, and the rest of the North Pacific Ocean, along with a real-time wind profiler of the central Pacific. We find high pressure systems far to the northeast and northwest of Hawaii, with an associated ridge of high pressure offshore of the eastern islands. At the same time, we have a deep gale low pressure system to the north, with an associated cold front moving down through the state from the northwest. This cold front has prompted strengthening kona winds, which will continue with the frontal passage and out ahead of it into Tuesday. Lighter winds will come in from the west to northwest in the wake of this cold front into Wednesday. As we get into the later part of the week, strong and gusty kona winds will develop again ahead of yet another cold front…arriving Friday into the weekend.

An active Pacific cold front is sweeping down through the state…bringing gusty winds and showers. Here’s the looping radar image showing bands of showers heading towards the leeward sides of the islands locally, riding up on the gusty southwesterly winds. We will see a few prefrontal showers along our leeward sides ahead of the fronts arrival…especially across Maui County at the time of this writing. This front will bring rainfall across the state into Tuesday…some of which may be briefly heavy in places. Kauai has had this frontal cloud band move by, with Oahu getting into the action during the evening hours, and then down into Maui County and the Big Island Tuesday into the night. The outlook includes somewhat drier weather for the state through the middle part of the week. Looking further ahead, the models continue suggesting that yet another wet cold front will arrive Friday into the weekend. I’ll be back with more information on all of the above, I hope you have a great Monday night wherever you’re spending it! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Here in Kula, Maui: The main weather element early this Monday morning is the wind, which is off and on rather strong and gusty. The air temperature near its minimal reading was 57 degrees here in Kula. At the same time, it was a warmer 73 degrees down at the Kahului airport near the ocean…with 36 degrees atop the Haleakala Crater. The summit of the Big Island was an even colder 28 degrees atop Mauna Kea. The warmest temperature across the state at the same time was 75 at the airport in Honolulu.

~~~ It’s early Monday afternoon, and I just got back from attending a talk about weather and climate change down in Paia. It was presented by a friend of mine, Dr. Steven Businger, a professor of Meteorology at the University of Hawaii…which was very good. He and his lady friend are meeting me here at my place soon, and we’re going to take a walk out along Thompson Ranch Road. I look forward to not only the walk, and maybe we’ll even see Oprah Winfrey, like I did the last time I was over there in Kokea. As for the weather, its windy, mostly clear still, with just some clouds over on the windward side…which is usually the leeward side…when the trade winds are blowing.

~~~ We’re into the early evening hours, I just got back from a nice hike with my two friends from Oahu. I’m often saying to myself “I sort of wish I could get caught out in the rain, and get wet”, well, I was finally able to pull that off! I somehow forgot to bring my raincoat, and was wearing just a t-shirt. Fortunately, the kona winds were blowing, so it wasn’t cold, although I definitely got a bit wet. I’m back home here in Kula now, and its windy, with fog and light showers just before sunset. I certainly won’t be seeing the sunset today, as there are clouds galore between here and the ocean below. Now at almost 9pm, we’ve been having off and on heavy rainfall…causing some flooding here on Maui.


World-wide tropical cyclone activity:


>>> Atlantic Ocean: The last regularly scheduled Tropical Weather Outlook of the 2014 Atlantic hurricane season…has occurred. Routine issuance of the Tropical Weather Outlook will resume on June 1, 2015. During the off-season, Special Tropical Weather Outlooks will be issued as conditions warrant.


Here’s a satellite image of the Atlantic Ocean

>>> Caribbean Sea: The last regularly scheduled Tropical Weather Outlook of the 2014 Atlantic hurricane season…has occurred. Routine issuance of the Tropical Weather Outlook will resume on June 1, 2015. During the off-season, Special Tropical Weather Outlooks will be issued as conditions warrant.


>>> Gulf of Mexico: The last regularly scheduled Tropical Weather Outlook of the 2014 Atlantic hurricane season…has occurred. Routine issuance of the Tropical Weather Outlook will resume on June 1, 2015. During the off-season, Special Tropical Weather Outlooks will be issued as conditions warrant.


Here’s a satellite image of the Caribbean Sea…and the Gulf of Mexico.

>>> Eastern Pacific: The last regularly scheduled Tropical Weather Outlook of the 2014 North Pacific hurricane season…has occurred. Routine issuance of the Tropical Weather Outlook will resume on May 15, 2015. During the off-season, Special Tropical Weather Outlooks will be issued as conditions warrant.


Here’s a wide satellite image that covers the entire area between Mexico, out through the central Pacific…to the International Dateline.


Here’s the link to the National Hurricane Center (NHC)


>>> Central Pacific: The central north Pacific hurricane season has officially ended. Routine issuance of the tropical weather outlook will resume on June 1, 2015. During the off-season, special tropical weather outlooks will be issued as conditions warrant.


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


>>> Northwest Pacific Ocean: Typhoon 02W (Higos) remains active well to the east of Guam in the western Pacific, here’s the JTWC graphical track map…along with a NOAA satellite image.


 >>> 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: Seafloor Volcano Pulses May Alter Climate – Vast ranges of volcanoes hidden under the oceans are presumed by scientists to be the gentle giants of the planet, oozing lava at slow, steady rates along mid-ocean ridges. But a new study shows that they flare up on strikingly regular cycles, ranging from two weeks to 100,000 years—and, that they erupt almost exclusively during the first six months of each year. The pulses—apparently tied to short- and long-term changes in earth’s orbit, and to sea levels–may help trigger natural climate swings. Scientists have already speculated that volcanic cycles on land emitting large amounts of carbon dioxide might influence climate; but up to now there was no evidence from submarine volcanoes. The findings suggest that models of earth’s natural climate dynamics, and by extension human-influenced climate change, may have to be adjusted.


“People have ignored seafloor volcanoes on the idea that their influence is small—but that’s because they are assumed to be in a steady state, which they’re not,” said the study’s author, marine geophysicist Maya Tolstoy of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “They respond to both very large forces, and to very small ones, and that tells us that we need to look at them much more closely.” A related study by a separate team this week in the journal Science bolsters Tolstoy’s case by showing similar long-term patterns of submarine volcanism in an Antarctic region Tolstoy did not study.


Volcanically active mid-ocean ridges crisscross earth’s seafloors like stitching on a baseball, stretching some 37,000 miles. They are the growing edges of giant tectonic plates; as lavas push out, they form new areas of seafloor, which comprise some 80 percent of the planet’s crust. Conventional wisdom holds that they erupt at a fairly constant rate–but Tolstoy finds that the ridges are actually now in a languid phase. Even at that, they produce maybe eight times more lava annually than land volcanoes. Due to the chemistry of their magmas, the carbon dioxide they are thought to emit is currently about the same as, or perhaps a little less than, from land volcanoes—about 88 million metric tons a year. But were the undersea chains to stir even a little bit more, their CO2 output would shoot up, says Tolstoy.


Some scientists think volcanoes may act in concert with Milankovitch cycles–repeating changes in the shape of earth’s solar orbit, and the tilt and direction of its axis—to produce suddenly seesawing hot and cold periods. The major one is a 100,000-year cycle in which the planet’s orbit around the sun changes from more or less an annual circle into an ellipse that annually brings it closer or farther from the sun. Recent ice ages seem to build up through most of the cycle; but then things suddenly warm back up near the orbit’s peak eccentricity. The causes are not clear.


Enter volcanoes. Researchers have suggested that as icecaps build on land, pressure on underlying volcanoes also builds, and eruptions are suppressed. But when warming somehow starts and the ice begins melting, pressure lets up, and eruptions surge. They belch CO2 that produces more warming, which melts more ice, which creates a self-feeding effect that tips the planet suddenly into a warm period. A 2009 paper from Harvard University says that land volcanoes worldwide indeed surged six to eight times over background levels during the most recent deglaciation, 12,000 to 7,000 years ago. The corollary would be that undersea volcanoes do the opposite: as earth cools, sea levels may drop 100 meters, because so much water gets locked into ice. This relieves pressure on submarine volcanoes, and they erupt more. At some point, could the increased CO2 from undersea eruptions start the warming that melts the ice covering volcanoes on land?


That has been a mystery, partly because undersea eruptions are almost impossible to observe. However, Tolstoy and other researchers recently have been able to closely monitor 10 submarine eruption sites using sensitive new seismic instruments. They have also produced new high-resolution maps showing outlines of past lava flows. Tolstoy analyzed some 25 years of seismic data from ridges in the Pacific, Atlantic and Arctic oceans, plus maps showing past activity in the south Pacific.


The long-term eruption data, spread over more than 700,000 years, showed that during the coldest times, when sea levels are low, undersea volcanism surges, producing visible bands of hills. When things warm up and sea levels rise to levels similar to the present, lava erupts more slowly, creating bands of lower topography. Tolstoy attributes this not only to the varying sea level, but to closely related changes in earth’s orbit. When the orbit is more elliptical, Earth gets squeezed and unsqueezed by the sun’s gravitational pull at a rapidly varying rate as it spins daily—a process that she thinks tends to massage undersea magma upward, and help open the tectonic cracks that let it out. When the orbit is fairly (though not completely) circular, as it is now, the squeezing/unsqueezing effect is minimized, and there are fewer eruptions.


The idea that remote gravitational forces influence volcanism is mirrored by the short-term data, says Tolstoy. She says the seismic data suggest that today, undersea volcanoes pulse to life mainly during periods that come every two weeks. That is the schedule upon which combined gravity from the moon and sun cause ocean tides to reach their lowest points, thus subtly relieving pressure on volcanoes below. Seismic signals interpreted as eruptions followed fortnightly low tides at eight out of nine study sites. Furthermore, Tolstoy found that all known modern eruptions occur from January through June. January is the month when Earth is closest to the sun, July when it is farthest—a period similar to the squeezing/unsqueezing effect Tolstoy sees in longer-term cycles. “If you look at the present-day eruptions, volcanoes respond even to much smaller forces than the ones that might drive climate,” she said.


Daniel Fornari, a senior scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution not involved in the research, called the study “a very important contribution.” He said it was unclear whether the contemporary seismic measurements signal actual lava flows or just seafloor rumbles and cracking. But, he said, the study “clearly could have important implications for better quantifying and characterizing our assessment of climate variations over decadal to tens to hundreds of thousands of years cycles.”


Edward Baker, a senior ocean scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said, “The most interesting takeaway from this paper is that it provides further evidence that the solid Earth, and the air and water all operate as a single system.”