Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs / December 16-17, 2009

December 16-17, 2009

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

Lihue, Kauai – 80
Honolulu, Oahu – 81
Kaneohe, Oahu – 82
Kaunakakai, Molokai – 79
Kahului, Maui – 82
Hilo, Hawaii – 83
Kailua-kona – 82

Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level around the state – and on the highest mountains…at 4pm Wednesday afternoon:

Port Allen, Kauai – 82F
Molokai airport – 77

Haleakala Crater – 52 (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 39 (near 14,000 feet on the Big Island)

Precipitation Totals – The following numbers represent the largest precipitation totals (inches) during the last 24 hours on each of the major islands, as of Wednesday afternoon:

0.01 Mount Waialeale, Kauai  
0.01 Waimanalo, Oahu
0.00 Molokai 
0.00 Lanai
0.00 Kahoolawe
0.00 Maui
0.01 Kawainui Stream, Big Island

Marine Winds – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing an approaching cold front to the northwest, moving southeast into the state of Hawaii. The breezes will be from the southwest ahead of the front…gradually become north to northeast in the wake of the front.   

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 the state during the day and night. This next image is one that gives close images of the islands only during the daytime hours, and is referred to as a Close-up visible image. This next image shows a larger view of the Pacific…giving perspective to the wider ranging cloud patterns in the Pacific Ocean. 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 webcam on the summit of near 14,000 foot Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. The tallest peak on the island of Maui is the Haleakala Crater, which is near 10,000 feet in elevation. These two webcams are available during the daylight hours here in the islands…and when there’s a big moon rising just after sunset for an hour or two! Plus, during the nights and early mornings you will be able to see stars, and the sunrise too…depending upon weather conditions.

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. Here’s a tracking map covering both the eastern and central Pacific Ocean. A satellite image, which shows the entire ocean area between Hawaii and the Mexican coast…can be found here.

 

Aloha Paragraphs

 

  Cold Front…pushing into the Hawaiian Islands

An active cold front will be pushing into the state soon…moving down through the island chain into Thursday. This cold front, along with an associated upper trough of low pressure, will bring a period of rainfall, as they move together southeast across the Aloha state. The cold air associated with this upper trough may bring the chance of a few thunderstorms to the islands as well.  Drier air will push into the state after these showers, first from the north, and then the more common NE trade winds into the weekend. Winds will falter again early next week as yet another cold front approaches, pushing a ridge of high pressure down over us again then. 

We saw light southeast winds picking up a notch, as the air flow veered around to the southwest Kona direction…ahead of the cold front. This cold front, after raining on Kauai Wednesday night, will slide down over Oahu towards Maui County Thursday, with the Big Island getting into the action hopefully late Thursday or by Friday. The computer models are trying to stall this cold front, and then have it wait, for a quick moving second band…which would together migrate through the 50th state at some point. Wednesday evening, using this satellite image, we see that there’s only a single band of clouds at the time of this writing however. Perhaps on Thursday, such a weather feature would present itself…time will tell as the old saying goes.





The north to northeast breezes coming into the state in the wake of the cloud band…will have a slight chill to them. Our air temperatures may be a couple of degrees cooler for a while…at least compared to the warmer air ahead of the front. As we move into the weekend, we’ll see improving weather conditions, with nice weather again then, as generally dry conditions take over in most areas. The winds are expected to swing around to the trade wind direction Saturday, which could always keep a few showers falling along the windward sides. The leeward sides, as is often the case, will stay dry and sunny for the  most part. Looking further ahead, the next cold front may arrive by the middle of next week, bringing another batch of rain to the islands then. 

It’s early Wednesday evening here on Maui, as I begin writing this last section of today’s narrative.  Wednesday was a voggy day here in many parts of the Hawaiian Islands, which was quite thick here on Maui. The last several days have been working up to this situation, but today it finally made for poor visibilities…in no uncertain terms. As noted above, we have some inclement weather conditons edging in our direction, although I don’t say that in a negative use of the word. Actually, many areas of the state have been dry to very dry, and will enjoy seeing this incoming moisture off the Pacific Ocean. Satellite imagery makes it look like there may be some locally heavy showers embedded in this cold front, so lets hope so. ~~~ I’m about ready to leave Kihei, to take the drive into Kahului…to the Maui Community College. We’re having our Christmas Party there, so there will be quite a bit of socializing, with a glass of wine in hand. These parties aren’t always that comfortable for me, but I’ll do my best to chit chat. I’m not sure why I feel this way, as these kinds of events can be fun, it’s just that sometimes they aren’t. I’ll let you know how it went, when I come back online with your next new weather narrative, early Thursday morning. At that time, I’ll also have the latest news on this exciting cold front then too. I trust that you will have a great Wednesday night until we meet here again! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting: A new study released by NASA shows that the aquifers for California’s primary agricultural region — the Central Valley — and its major mountain water source — the Sierra Nevada’s — have lost nearly enough water combined to fill Lake Mead, America’s largest reservoir. The findings, based on data from the NASA/German Aerospace Center Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace), reflect California’s extended drought and increased rates of groundwater being pumped for human uses, such as irrigation.

In research being presented this week at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, scientists from NASA and the University of California, Irvine, detailed California’s groundwater changes and outlined Grace-based research on other global aquifers. The twin Grace satellites monitor tiny month-to-month changes in Earth’s gravity field primarily caused by the movement of water in Earth’s land, ocean, ice and atmosphere reservoirs.

Grace’s ability to directly ‘weigh’ changes in water content provides new insights into how Earth’s water cycle may be changing. Combined, California’s Sacramento and San Joaquin drainage basins have shed more than 30 cubic kilometers of water since late 2003, said professor Jay Famiglietti of the University of California, Irvine.

A cubic kilometer is about 264.2 billion gallons, enough to fill 400,000 Olympic-size pools. The bulk of the loss occurred in California’s agricultural Central Valley. The Central Valley receives its irrigation from a combination of groundwater pumped from wells and surface water diverted from elsewhere.

Interesting2: For most of a decade, scientists have documented unfelt and slow-moving seismic events, called episodic tremor and slip, showing up in regular cycles under the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state and Vancouver Island in British Columbia. They last three weeks on average and release as much energy as a magnitude 6.5 earthquake. Now scientists have discovered more small events, lasting one to 70 hours, which occur in somewhat regular patterns during the 15-month intervals between episodic tremor and slip events.

"There appear to be tremor swarms that repeat, both in terms of their duration and in where they are. We haven’t seen enough yet to say whether they repeat in regular time intervals," said Kenneth Creager, a University of Washington professor of Earth and space sciences. "This continues to paint the picture of the possibility that a megathrust earthquake can occur closer to the Puget Sound region than was thought just a few years ago," he said.

The phenomenon, which Creager discussed during a presentation at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, is the latest piece of evidence as scientists puzzle out exactly what is happening deep below the surface near Washington state’s populous Interstate 5 corridor. He noted that the work shows that tremor swarms follow a size distribution similar to earthquakes, with larger events occurring much less frequently than small events.

The Cascadia subduction zone, where the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate dips beneath the North American plate, runs just off the Pacific coast from northern California to the northern edge of Vancouver Island in British Columbia. It can be the source of massive megathrust earthquakes on the order of magnitude 9 about every 500 years. The last one occurred in 1700.

The fault along the central Washington coast, where the Pacific and Juan de Fuca plates are locked together most of the time but break apart from each other during a powerful megathrust earthquake, was believed to lie 80 miles or more from the Seattle area. But research has shown that the locked zone extends deeper and farther east than previously thought, bringing the edge of the rupture zone beneath the Olympic Mountains, perhaps 40 miles closer to the Seattle area.

It is this locked area that can rupture to produce a megathrust earthquake that causes widespread heavy damage, comparable to the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake or the great Alaska quake of 1964. Episodic tremor and slip events appear to occur at the interface of the plates as they gradually descend beneath the surface, at depths of about 19 to 28 miles.

The smaller tremors between slip episodes, what Creager refers to as inter-episodic tremor and slip events, appear to occur at the interface of the plates a little farther east and a few miles deeper. "There’s a whole range of events that take place on or near the plate interface. Each improvement in data collection and processing reveals new discoveries," Creager said.

Episodic tremor and slip events often begin in the area of Olympia, Wash., and move northward to southern Vancouver Island over a three-week period, but scientists have yet to pin down such patterns among the smaller tremors that occur between the slip events.

Interesting3: Bacteria inhabited our planet for more than 4 billion years before humans showed up, and they’ll probably outlive us by as many eons more. That suggests they may have something to teach us. New research from Tel Aviv University bacteria expert Prof. Eshel Ben-Jacob of the Raymond and Beverly Sackler School of Physics and Astronomy, grounded in the study of bacteria, presents compelling evidence to suggest there may be good reasons why most people should not automatically opt for the swine flu H1N1 shot.

In research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), Prof. Ben Jacob uses the decision-making of bacteria, an analogue of "game theory," as a model to make his case. "Unlike our health authorities, bacteria would never panic," he says. "Bacteria don’t follow the media or watch cable news.

Instead, they send chemical messages to each other — in a colony 100 times larger than the earth’s human population — to make their decisions. And based on what we’ve seen in bacterial colonies, I know they would be suspicious committing to swine flu shots. They wouldn’t opt for a colony wide vaccination," Prof. Ben Jacob concludes.

Interesting4: What secrets about your risk for diseases are written in your own personal "Book of Life" — the 30,000 or so genes that make you you? Advances in DNA-sequencing technology are bringing closer the day when it will be more economical for consumers to get an answer to that question, and others, by ordering up the deciphering of their entire genetic endowment — their "personal genome."

That’s the possibility that Chemical & Engineering News raises in a compelling new story. With their Book of Life in hand, consumers and their physicians could map out strategies for the prevention, early diagnosis, and more effective treatment of diseases ranging from cancer to rare-genetic disorders.

C&EN Senior Editor Celia Henry Arnaud notes that the first human genome sequence cost more than $2 billion and took about a decade to complete. Technological advances now have cut the time to as little as one week, and some companies are charging individuals $48,000 for the service, a cost that experts expect to drop sharply in the coming years, the article notes.

But the technology also raises important ethical and legal issues, including the possibility of discrimination on the basis of genetic information in the areas of employment and insurance coverage. Many believe that personal genomes are inevitable. "In the future, sequencing will be so cheap and so easy to access that everybody could get sequenced if they want. It’ll be iPod pricing," says the CEO of a company that specializes in direct-to-consumer genome sequencing.

Interesting5: Nearly 20 percent of the U.S. population — or almost 60 million people — went without health insurance at some point since January 2008, according to government estimates released Wednesday. The analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention comes as Democratic senators wrestle to pass their version of health reform legislation before the end of the year to help make good on President Barack Obama’s top domestic goal of overhauling the nation’s $2.5 trillion healthcare system.

Much of the focus so far has been on how to expand access to health insurance in a nation where coverage is closely tied to employment but 10 percent of the work force in unemployed. More than 45 million people are uninsured. While the CDC’s findings largely backed that figure, they also found 58.4 million lacked coverage at some point in the year prior to the survey, while 31.9 million — or nearly 11 percent — did not have insurance for more than a year.

Two-thirds of those who did not have coverage for at least part of the time were unemployed working-age adults. Those most likely to lack health coverage were Hispanics, men and young adults ages 18 to 24, the CDC found. The CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics analyzed data on 32,694 people who responded from January through June 2009 as part of an ongoing survey.

At a time when much of the debate on the Senate bill has focused on its inclusion of a government-run "public option" insurance plan, the CDC found 20 percent of children and adults age 64 or younger are already covered by government health programs. Democrats plan to strip the public option before the full Senate votes. The Medicaid program helps cover many of the poor, including children. Youth can also get care under the Children Health Insurance Program, which was extended by lawmakers earlier this year.

Younger people with disabilities could also be covered under Medicare, which covers those age 65 or older. One bright spot in the report: more children received health coverage, largely through the government. The number of children enrolled in government health insurance programs also rose from 34.2 percent in 2008 to 37.4 percent in the first half of 2009, according to the study. Overall, 8.2 percent of children still lack health care coverage, it found.

Interesting6: Over the past 16 years, the ski season has been steadily shrinking — despite the fact resorts dramatically have improved their snowmaking, expanding it over a wider area and investing in technology that allows them to make snow at warmer temperatures. But according to the National Ski Areas Association, Western ski resorts have been losing nearly a day of skiing a year since 1990. Whether you call it global warming or climate change, warming temperatures — last week’s cold snap notwithstanding — are having a serious long-range effect on skiing.

The ski industry, experts said, is the canary in the coal mine — the thing that will die first when the weather is too warm to support a snowy Sierra winter. That’s why groups like the Ski Area Citizens Coalition, which handed out its environmental grades for Western resorts, have been so critical of resorts’ efforts to combat global warming. The ski industry officials say they aren’t ignoring the threat of global warming.

In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to find an industry that does more to battle climate change than ski resorts. The industry launched its fight against climate change several years ago with its Keep Winter Cool program, and since then more than 60 resorts have purchased renewable energy credits they said help reduce their carbon footprint. Renewable-energy credits are payments made to alternative-energy producers, such as wind farms or solar-energy producers.

The credits don’t mean the resorts actually are using renewable energy to run their lifts and power their night-skiing lights, although some are. About 30 of the United States’ 326 ski resorts say they are offsetting 100 percent of their energy use through renewable-energy credits. That group includes Vail Resorts, which owns Heavenly on the South Shore, and Sugar Bowl, which was the first California resort to completely offset its energy consumption by purchasing renewable energy credits.

Interesting7: Global warming is giving a boost to Sonoran Desert plants that have an edge during cold weather, according to new research. Although the overall numbers of winter annuals have declined since 1982, species that germinate and grow better at low temperatures are becoming more common. "It’s an unexpected result — that global warming has led to an increase in cold-adapted species," said lead author Sarah Kimball, a research associate at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

"Because the winter rains are arriving later, they are occurring under colder temperatures." Climate change is shifting the winter storm track so the Sonoran Desert’s winter rains now generally begin in late November or early December, rather than during the balmy days of late October. Therefore seeds that require winter rains must sprout during the cooler days of December.

"Southern Arizona has been getting hotter and drier for the last 25 or 30 years, and as a result, the desert annuals we’ve been studying at Tumamoc Hill have been changing," said co-author D. Lawrence Venable, the UA’s director of research at Tumamoc Hill. The researchers focused on the nine most abundant species, which comprise 74 percent of all winter annuals found at the study area.

The species of winter desert annuals studied are ones Venable calls "the bread and butter flowers that you see everywhere." Some are called "belly flowers" because they are best seen close up, in contrast to the less common, showy desert annuals like poppies and lupines. The findings are part of a long-term study of winter annuals that Venable, a UA professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, initiated at Tumamoc Hill in 1982.

Kimball, Venable and their colleagues are publishing their paper, "Contemporary Climate Change in the Sonoran Desert Favors Cold-Adapted Species," in an upcoming issue of the journal Global Change Biology. Amy Angert, now at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colo., and Travis Huxman of the UA are also co-authors. The National Science Foundation and the Philecology Foundation of Fort Worth, Texas funded the research.

In 1982, Venable began intensive research into the growth of desert annuals in relation to climate by setting up permanent study plots at Tumamoc Hill. His research team has been continually monitoring the germination, survival and seed production of the winter annuals ever since. The weather station on Tumamoc Hill provides records of local temperatures and precipitation.

Venable now has 72 plots and a team of people to study each plant’s life. Team members start collecting the data 10 days after the first winter rain and after every subsequent rain. Even when there are no subsequent rain events, the team still collects the data monthly. For each plot, a clear sheet of stiff plastic serves as the year’s record of the plants’ location and life history.

On each visit, a researcher places the plastic sheet on a frame 3 inches above the plot and uses a permanent marker to record the location of each germinating plant on the plastic sheet. As the season progresses, each plant’s survival and seed production is marked on the same sheet. To make sure even the littlest plant is not overlooked, the researchers must hunch over the plot and its plastic sheet.

"We use knee pads, for sure," Kimball said. In 2007, Kimball reviewed the data and realized that the temperature at which germination occurred had declined steadily since 1982. However, some species had not done as badly as others and she wondered why. So she turned to Venable’s long-term data set to see which aspect of the plants’ growth was responsible for the change.

She wanted to know whether some species were germinating better or grew better or just made more seeds. In a previous study, Venable and his colleagues had examined the physiology of the nine species and found that some grow better under cold conditions and are more efficient at using water. Those species are now becoming more common as the changing climate shifts the onset of the winter rains. "The physiological component was the ‘Ah Ha!’ thing," Venable said.

"The more water-use-efficient species are more adapted for growing under cold conditions." Some cold-adapted winter annuals that are becoming more common are popcorn flower, or Pectocarya recurvata, and Erodium cicutarium, known more commonly as red filaree or storksbill.

In contrast, species that germinate better when it is warm, such as wooly sunflower, known to scientists as Eriophyllum lanosum, and a species of plantain, Plantago insularis, are becoming less common. "Even though overall the winter growing season is getting warmer, what’s important in this system is that the growing season is initiated at a later date under colder temperatures," Kimball said. "This demonstrates that the response of organisms to climate change can be unexpected."