Hawaiian Islands Weather Details & Aloha Paragraphs / July 27-28, 2018

Air Temperatures – The following high temperatures (F) were recorded across the state of Hawaii Friday…along with the low temperatures Friday:

87 – 78  Lihue, Kauai
89 – 79  Honolulu, Oahu
90 – 73  Molokai AP
92 – 73  Kahului AP, Maui
89 – 78  Kailua Kona
86 – 72  Hilo AP, Hawaii

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

1.23  Mount Waialeale, Kauai
0.37  Maunawili, Oahu
0.00  Molokai
0.02  Lanai
0.00  Kahoolawe
0.01  West Wailuaiki, Maui
1.00  Pahoa, Big Island

The following numbers represent the strongest wind gusts (mph) Friday evening:

29  Port Allen, Kauai
32  Oahu Forest NWR, Oahu
28  Molokai
27  Lanai
43  Kahoolawe
30  Kahului AP, Maui
33  South Point, Big Island

Hawaii’s Mountains – Here’s a link to the live webcam on the summit of our tallest mountain Mauna Kea (nearly 13,800 feet high) on the Big Island of Hawaii. Here’s the webcam for the 10,000+ feet high Haleakala Crater on Maui. These webcams are available during the daylight hours here in the islands, and at night whenever there’s a big moon shining down. Also, at night you will be able to see the stars, and the sunrise and sunset too…depending upon weather conditions.

Aloha Paragraphs

The tropical waters of the Pacific remain warm (click to enlarge)

Thunderstorms to our west, southwest, south and southeast

Partly cloudy, some cloudy areas…considerable higher level clouds west

Showers locally and offshore…mostly windward areas
Looping image

 

Small Craft Advisory…windiest coasts and channels around Maui County and the Big Island

 

~~~ Hawaii Weather Narrative ~~~

 

Broad Brush Overview: Look for moderate to strong trade winds through the rest of the week, as high pressure remains in place north and northeast of the islands. Showers will fall generally over the windward sides, with a few afternoon showers over the leeward slopes of the Big Island. A series of tropical disturbances will pass by south of the islands through early next week, leading to increased showers over mainly windward slopes. A more pronounced area of tropical moisture, associated with tropical cyclone Gilma…will likely affect the state later next week.

Details: High pressure will remain anchored north of the state, while a ridge aloft will maintain stable conditions. Meanwhile, a pair of weak tropical disturbances will pass by to our south. Look for an increase in the trade wind speeds as these minor low pressure systems push by. In addition, we’ll see brief increases in shower activity along windward slopes, mainly on the Big Island. There will also be episodes of higher level clouds as the upper level trough remains to the west, filtering our sunshine…and bringing some color to our sunrise and sunsets at times.

Looking Ahead: Finally, an increase in rainfall is likely during the middle to end of next week. Tropical Storm Gilma, now still in the eastern Pacific, is forecast to dissipate well east of the state, although its associated moisture will likely impact the islands as early as Wednesday. Significant timing differences are noted in the forecast models, with the European model bringing the moisture in a day earlier than the American GFS model. Otherwise, the islands should remain free of any tropical cyclone issues.

Here’s a near real-time Wind Profile of the Pacific Ocean – along with a Closer View of the islands / Here’s the latest Weather Map / Here’s the latest Vog Forecast Animation / Here’s the Vog Information website

Marine Environmental Conditions: The trade winds will continue through early next week, due to surface high pressure far north and northeast of the islands. A Small Craft Advisory (SCA) remains in effect through Saturday afternoon for the typically windier waters adjacent to the islands of Maui County and the Big Island. The latest forecast keeps SCA conditions over these same waters from Saturday night through Tuesday.

Moderately strong trade winds will generate choppy surf along east facing shores of the islands into early next week. A long fetch of strong trades developing east and northeast of the islands next week, may cause a slight increase in surf heights along east facing shores. Small southeast and south swells will maintain small surf along south facing shores through the middle of next week.

World-wide Tropical Cyclone Activity

 

Here’s the Saturday Pacific Disaster Center (PDC) Weather Wall Presentation covering the Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea…and the Gulf of Mexico

Here’s the latest Pacific Disaster Center (PDC) Weather Wall Presentation covering the Pacific and Indian Oceans, including Tropical Cyclones 15W (Jongdari), and 08E (Gilma)

>>> Atlantic Ocean: No active tropical cyclones

>>> Caribbean Sea: No active tropical cyclones

>>> Gulf of Mexico: No active tropical cyclones

Tropical cyclone formation is not expected during the next 5 days.

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

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

>>> Eastern Pacific: 

Tropical Cyclone 08E (Gilma)

NHC textual advisory
NHC graphical map

1.) According to the NHC…A broad area of low pressure has formed several hundred miles south-southeast of Acapulco, Mexico. Environmental conditions appear conducive for some slow development of this system while it moves westward to west-northwestward during the next several days.

* Formation chance through 48 hours…low…10 percent
* Formation chance through 5 days…low…30 percent

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: No active tropical cyclones

1.) According to the CHPC…Disorganized showers and thunderstorms associated with the remnants of former Tropical Depression 09E are about 1060 miles southeast of Hilo, Hawaii. Strong upper-level winds are expected to inhibit regeneration of this system as it moves westward at about 10 mph this weekend.

* Formation chance through 48 hours…low…near 0 percent
* Formation chance through 5 days…low…near 0 percent

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

>>> Northwest Pacific Ocean:

Tropical Cyclone 15W (Jongdari)

>>> South Pacific Ocean: No active tropical cyclones

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


Interesting: Just 13% of the Ocean Is Untouched by Humans – Oceans cover approximately 70 percent of the earth’s surface, and it seems almost none of that marine expanse is off-limits to adventurous and resource-needy humans.

Just 13.2 percent of the world’s seas — or about 20.8 million square miles — remains truly wild, a new study suggests. (For comparison, Asia covers an area of 17.2 million square miles.)

“Almost all of that wilderness is located in the Arctic, the Antarctic or around remote, Pacific Island nations,” study co-author Kendall Jones, a doctoral student at the University of Queensland in Australia and a conservation planning specialist with the Wildlife Conservation Society.

“And in coastal regions, where human activity is the most intense, there’s almost no wilderness left at all,” Jones added. “And we also found that almost all wilderness is currently unprotected, leaving it vulnerable to being lost at any time as improvements in fishing and shipping technology allow us to get further into the ocean and fish deeper.”

Perhaps just as disturbing, Jones said, is that much of the wilderness is unprotected: Just 4.9 percent of that marine wilderness exists in marine protected areas, where regulations restrict human activities, the study authors found.

Finding the wilderness

To identify wilderness, which the study authors defined as areas “free from intense human activity,” Jones said, they compiled data on the levels of various human activities in the seas. Then, they identified the areas showing the least of these activities.

Specifically, they assigned each square kilometer of ocean a value for how much it was affected by each of 15 human-caused factors, such as fishing, commercial shipping, and runoff from nutrients and pesticides, and four climate-change-related factors, including ocean acidification and sea-level rise.

To qualify as wilderness, an area had to pass two tests: It had to score within the lowest 10 percent of the range of impact values for all 15 human factors, and it had to score within the lowest 10 percent of values for cumulative impact, which included all 15 factors plus the climate-change-related factors. (The researchers did not include climate change within the first test because, if they had, none of the ocean would have qualified as wilderness, Jones said.)

They then compared the wilderness areas with maps of marine protected areas to determine which of the wilderness areas were protected.

Not much is untouched by humans

Most countries have “some patches left” of wilderness, Jones said, but not large ones. In the U.S., for example, they found some marine wilderness in the waters off the northern coast of Alaska, Jones said.

Yet over half — 66 percent — of the marine wilderness exists in the high seas, which are waters over which no country has jurisdiction, Jones said. Some background: Every country controls the natural resources in the waters out to a certain distance — 200 nautical miles — from their shores, Jones said. The high seas are so far from land that no country controls them. Because of the high seas’ remoteness, the researchers had expected to find high levels of wilderness there, but they found less wilderness than they had anticipated, Jones said.

“Our results show there is almost nowhere in the ocean that people aren’t interested in using for some purpose,” Jones added.

The researchers also found that, as previous research had indicated, wilderness areas had much greater biodiversity than non-wilderness areas. Wilderness areas possessed a larger variety of species, including rare species, than non-wilderness areas, as well as unique combinations of species, the authors wrote in their study. The mixes of species found in these areas are unique because they include top predators alongside other species, Jones noted. “In non-wilderness areas, often the top predators are gone,” Jones said.

In addition to preserving biodiversity, wilderness areas are like time machines that reveal the way the oceans were before human activities began to degrade them.

Protecting the wilderness

So, what does the future hold? That depends on our course of action. “Protecting [marine wilderness areas] is crucial if we’re going to protect the full range of marine biodiversity into the future,” Jones said.

To do so, the authors believe that first, countries should identify the wilderness areas within their jurisdiction that are in the greatest danger of being lost and designate them as marine protected areas, Jones said.

Conservation in the high seas is more difficult since, by definition, no country has jurisdiction there, he added.

Still, the United Nations is debating a measure for high-seas conservation, which would allow the designation of protected areas in the high seas, Jones said, adding that multinational regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs) — “international organizations formed by countries with fishing interests in an area,” as the European Commission defines them — could also protect wilderness in the high seas by agreeing to leave certain areas alone, Jones said.

Finally, fishing in the high seas is profitable only because of government subsidies that make traveling to such remote areas possible, Jones said. These subsidies are highest in Japan and Spain, followed by China, South Korea and the United States, according to a recent study. “Subsidy reform for those nations could be another way to discourage the erosion of these last wilderness areas,” Jones said.

In general, the authors wrote, conservation efforts on both land and sea have neglected the protection of wilderness areas in favor of trying to save individual endangered species.

“If you were to use a health analogy, the current system is kind of like a government spending all of its health budget on emergency heart surgery, which is the species-extinctions end, without spending any money on preventing those heart conditions from occurring in the first place,” Jones said. Jones and his co-authors believe that conservation policies should not only try to save endangered species but also protect species and ecosystems from becoming threatened to begin with.

“What we’re arguing for is a dual-pronged approach, where at one end, you’re stopping species and ecosystems [from] going extinct, and at the other end, you’re saving the last intact places that are under low impact,” Jones said.

The study is detailed June 26 in the journal Current Biology.