Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Tuesday afternoon:
Lihue airport, Kauai – 79
Honolulu airport, Oahu – 82
Kaneohe, Oahu – 78
Molokai airport – 81
Kahului airport, Maui – 82
Kona airport – 81
Hilo airport, Hawaii – 78
Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level – and on the highest mountain tops…as of 5pm Tuesday evening:
Kahului, Maui – 81
Lihue, Kauai – 75F
Haleakala Crater – missing (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 Tuesday afternoon:
5.41 Mount Waialeale, Kauai
2.45 Nuuanu Upper, Oahu
0.00 Molokai
0.13 Lanai
0.00 Kahoolawe
0.38 Kula, Maui
1.45 Pohakuloa Keamuku, Big Island
Marine Winds – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a strong 1040 millibar high pressure system far to our northeast, with a high pressure ridge extending southwest to the north of the islands. Our winds will be east Wednesday, gradually turning southeast or south later Thursday.
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 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 web cam 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 web cams 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. Of course, as we know, our hurricane season ends November 30th here in the central Pacific.
Aloha Paragraphs
Trade winds Wednesday…generally fair weather
Our winds will be blowing generally in the light to moderately strong realms…coming in from the easterly trade wind direction. This weather map shows a strong 1040 millibar high pressure system far to our northeast. This high pressure cell has an associated ridge of high pressure extending to the north of the islands. As the cold front has now dissipated, our winds have filled in and increased from the trade wind direction…as expected. Winds will swing around to the southeast again by Thursday or so, ahead of the next cold front…now expected to arrive over Kauai Thursday night, dropping down through the island chain on Friday. Cool northerly winds will flood in over the state in the wake of the cold front, gradually turning to the warmer trade wind directions this weekend.
Winds will be light to moderately strong…the following numbers represent the strongest gusts, along with directions early Tuesday evening:
14 mph Port Allen, Kauai – SE
28 Kahuku, Oahu – NE
08 Molokai – NNW
31 Kahoolawe – ESE
21 Kapalua, Maui – NE
00 Lanai Airport
25 South Point, Big Island – NE
We can use the following links to see what’s going on in our local skies. This large University of Washington satellite image shows lots of high and middle level clouds over the ocean to our west through north. At the same time we find generally northwest through southeast bands of lower level clouds…out to the east through northeast of the islands. Looking at this NOAA satellite picture, it shows mostly clear to partly cloudy skies over the islands, although the Big Island is the one exception Tuesday evening. We can use this looping satellite image to see lots of high and middle level clouds streaming southward…to the west of Kauai. At the same time we see lower level cumulus moving east to west…in the trade wind flow. Checking out this looping radar image, it shows just a few showers, most notably to the south of the Big Island at the time of this writing.
There's been a speeding up of the arrival of the next cold front…the models are now suggesting Thursday night into Friday. Between now and then however, our local weather will be just fine…very nice in fact! Whatever showers that are around, and there won't be many, will tend to ride in on the east breezes, and fall over the leeward slopes during the afternoon hours locally too. Light to moderately heavy showers will sweep down through the state with the cold front.
It's clear here in Kihei, Maui Tuesday evening, although the generally dry clouds that formed along the Haleakala slopes during the afternoon hours, were still there at around 530pm. These clouds will evaporate, leaving a clear skied night, leading to a clear morning Wednesday. We will likely see some high clouds, which could become rather thick, arriving as the cold front nears later Wednesday into Thursday. If the winds turn more southeasterly Thursday, we could begin to see a bit of vog arriving. It won't last long if it arrives at all, before the cold front gets here. This isn't expected to be too much of a rainfall producer, with cool northerly winds bringing a slight cool snap for a little while, before warmer trade winds arrive this weekend, into early next week. ~~~ I'll be back early Wednesday morning with your next new weather narrative. I hope you have a great Tuesday night until then! Aloha for now…Glenn.
Interesting: This December marks the bicentennial of the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811-12, which are the biggest earthquakes known to have occurred in the central U.S. Now, based on the earthquake record in China, a University of Missouri researcher says that mid-continent earthquakes tend to move among fault systems, so the next big earthquake in the central U.S. may actually occur someplace else other than along the New Madrid faults.
Mian Liu, professor of geological sciences in the College of Arts and Science at MU, examined records from China, where earthquakes have been recorded and described for the past 2,000 years. Surprisingly, he found that during this time period big earthquakes have never occurred twice in the same place.
"In North China, where large earthquakes occur relatively frequently, not a single one repeated on the same fault segment in the past two thousand years," Liu said. "So we need to look at the 'big picture' of interacting faults, rather than focusing only on the faults where large earthquakes occurred in the recent past."
Mid-continent earthquakes, such as the ones that occurred along the New Madrid faults, occur on a complicated system of interacting faults spread throughout a large region. A large earthquake on one fault can increase the stress on other faults, making some of them more likely to have a major earthquake.
The major faults may stay dormant for thousands of years and then wake up to have a short period of activity. Along with co-authors Seth Stein, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at Northwestern University, and Hui Wang, a Chinese Earthquake Administration researcher, Liu believes this discovery will provide valuable information about the patterns of earthquakes in the central and eastern United States, northwestern Europe, and Australia.
The results have been published in the journal Lithosphere. "The New Madrid faults in the central U.S., for example, had three to four large events during 1811-12, and perhaps a few more in the past thousand years. This led scientists to believe that more were on the way," Stein said. "However, high-precision Global Positioning System (GPS) measurements in the past two decades have found no significant strain in the New Madrid area.
The China results imply that the major earthquakes at New Madrid may be ending, as the pressure will eventually shift to another fault." While this study shows that mid-continent earthquakes seem to be more random than previously thought, the researchers believe it actually helps them better understand these seismic events.
"The rates of earthquake energy released on the major fault zones in North China are complementary," Wang said. "Increasing seismic energy release on one fault zone was accompanied by decreasing energy on the others. This means that the fault zones are coupled mechanically."
Studying fault coupling with GPS measurements, earthquake history, and computer simulation will allow the scientists to better understand the mysterious mid-continent earthquakes. "What we've discovered about mid-continent earthquakes won't make forecasting them any easier, but it should help," Liu said.
Interesting2: Government regulators could more realistically assess the value of improving food safety if they considered the fact that consumers typically want to avoid getting sick — even if it means they have to pay a little extra for safer food, researchers say. In the world of food regulation, cost-benefit analyses are a primary tool for assessing the societal benefits of mandating more stringent — and more expensive — processing practices.
In most cases, regulators determine a dollar value associated with pursuing new rules by estimating how many illnesses and deaths the safer processing would prevent. But a recent study proposes a new way to approach these estimates. Instead of focusing on reducing food-borne illnesses and deaths associated with a specific pathogen, why not ask consumers how valuable food-safety improvements are to them?
The researchers conducted such a national survey that they designed with the help of an economic model that predicts consumer behavior. The results suggested that Americans would be willing to pay about a dollar per person each year, or an estimated $305 million in the aggregate, for a 10 percent reduction in the likelihood that hamburger they buy in the supermarket is contaminated by E. coli, said Brian Roe, professor of agricultural, environmental and development economics at Ohio State University and co-author of the study.
By comparison, a 2008 U.S. Department of Agriculture analysis estimated the value of eradicating a specific type of E. coli contamination from all food sources would result in a benefit valued at $446 million. The problem with the federal estimate, Roe says, is that total eradication of the most common causes of food-borne illness is virtually impossible because of the exorbitant cost required to achieve such a goal.
And, he added, the more flexible method of measurement proposed in this study suggests that consumers are willing to pay more than expected for an outcome that offers much less than total eradication of pathogens. "We think what we are measuring is more realistic, as complete eradication is a highly unlikely outcome for any policy," Roe said.
"We also are quite certain that our estimates of consumers' willingness to pay would be higher than what the USDA would calculate using its cost-of-illness approach." Roe conducted the study with Mario Teisl of the University of Maine. The research is published in a recent issue of the journal Food Policy.
The researchers say their proposed method takes into account important variables that the average cost-benefit analysis doesn't measure, such as pain, suffering and worry, as well as food-borne illness that doesn't do any economic damage to an individual — their example is a case of food poisoning on a Friday night that resolves before the work week begins.
Their estimate also accounts for human behavior: Some consumers will opt not to eat what they buy, will overcook it to ensure they kill any pathogens, or simply do not get sick even when they eat bad food. In contrast, current methods of cost-benefit analysis involve translating an improvement in food safety into numbers: specifically, reductions in deaths and illnesses linked to a pathogen.
Costs factored into the assessment might include a co-pay for a visit to the doctor and lost wages, as well as the economic costs associated with death — say, the projected income not earned when a life is cut short. For example, to reach its $446 million estimate to eradicate E. coli cases that produce Shiga toxin and can lead to kidney damage, the USDA took the 73,480 cases of contamination that occur each year and assig
ned a formula-derived dollar amount to those cases to arrive at the benefit figure. "The projections will estimate how many fewer people will die, how many fewer will get sick, and how do we assign benefit values to those improvements in the human condition," Roe said.
"What we're saying is, let's think of a method where we can assign a value to that avoided case as well as one for a person who misses work and pays $20 to go to a doctor. "To hedge their bets, would people be willing to pay $2 a year, $5 a year, to limit the odds they're going to get sick from 1 in 100 down to 1 in 1,000? That's the data you really want."
Roe and Teisl analyzed surveys from 3,511 individuals. In the questionnaire, they set up six hypothetical scenarios around the purchase of either a package of hotdogs or a pound of hamburger.
They set prices for the packages — both "status quo" foods and those treated with either ethylene gas processing or electron beam irradiation to reduce contaminants — and then laid out a variety of probabilities that the treated or untreated food packages contained contamination with either E. coli or listeria, another pathogen that can cause food-borne illness.
They followed by asking respondents to choose one of three actions: buy the food treated with the pathogen-reducing technology, buy their usual brand, or stop buying this product altogether. The results showed that consumers will reach a limit to how much they want to pay to reduce their chances of getting sick.
If the treated product cost only 10 cents more than an untreated package, about 60 percent of respondents said they'd buy the improved product. But when that higher price reached $1.60 more per package, less than a third would opt for the treated product.
The structure of the survey also allowed researchers to see the influence of human behavior and opinions on likely illness outcomes. "A lot of other research is about what goes into your mouth. But you have a lot of leeway between when you pick food up in a store and when you decide whether you're going to take a bite," Roe said.
"What we're saying is this is not just about people who got sick, it's about everyone who could become sick and is worried about that and is willing to shell out a few more pennies per package to avoid that."
Among the hypothetical scenarios offered in the survey, aggregate figures for consumer willingness to pay ranged from $40 million for a 10 percent reduction of the likely presence of listeria pathogens in hotdogs to the $305 million for the 10 percent reduction in the likelihood of E. coli contamination in hamburger.
Roe noted, though, that these specific numbers are less important than the method used to reach them. He said the model used in this research to construct the hypothetical scenarios could be customized for a variety of different regulatory questions.
"If the food industry were forced to put technology in place that lowered the presence of E. coli and that ramped up prices to the extent where everybody had to pay about a dollar more out of pocket each year for hamburger, we're saying that, according to this model, that would be about an equal tradeoff for the U.S. population.
And if the technology costs only about 10 cents per person instead, that would seem like a good deal to most people," he said. "If regulators could become more comfortable with this measurement process, agencies might change the way they conduct their cost-benefit analysis. And that would be an interest of ours, to see if our work and others' work in this area will eventually change the way people attack these questions."
Interesting3: It may be hard to believe, but Antarctica was once covered in towering forests. One hundred million years ago, the Earth was in the grip of an extreme Greenhouse Effect. The polar ice caps had all but melted; in the south, rainforests inhabited by dinosaurs existed in their place.
These Antarctic ecosystems were adapted to the long months of winter darkness that occur at the poles, and were truly bizarre. But if global warming continues unabated, could these ancient forests be a taste of things to come?
One of the first people to uncover evidence for a once greener Antarctic was none other than the explorer, Robert Falcon Scott. Toiling back from the South Pole in 1912, he stumbled over fossil plants on the Beardmore Glacier at 82 degrees south. The extra weight of these specimens may have been a factor in his untimely demise. Yet his fossil discoveries also opened up a whole new window on Antarctica's sub-tropical past.
Forests in the frost
Professor Jane Francis of the University of Leeds is an intrepid explorer who has followed in Scott's footsteps. She has spent 10 field seasons in Antarctica collecting fossil plants and received the Polar Medal from the Queen in 2002.
"I still find the idea that Antarctica was once forested absolutely mind-boggling", she told the BBC. "We take it for granted that Antarctica has always been a frozen wilderness, but the ice caps only appeared relatively recently in geological history."
One of her most amazing fossil discoveries to date was made in the Transantarctic Mountains, not far from where Scott made his own finds. She recalled: "We were high up on glaciated peaks when we found a sedimentary layer packed full of fragile leaves and twigs."
These fossils proved to be remains of stunted bushes of beech. At only three to five million years old, they were some of the last plants to have lived on the continent before the deep freeze set in.
However, other fossils show that truly subtropical forests existed on Antarctica during even earlier times. This was during the "age of the dinosaurs" when much higher CO2 levels triggered a phase of extreme global warming.
"Go back 100 million years ago and Antarctica was covered in lush rainforests similar to those that exist in New Zealand today," said Dr Vanessa Bowman who works with Francis at the University of Leeds.
"We commonly find whole fossilized logs that must have come from really big trees." Professor Francis has been polishing thin slices of these logs to reveal the "annual rings" in the wood. Studying these tree-rings sheds light on ancient climate.
Dark secrets
Possibly the weirdest and most baffling feature of the polar forests was their adaptation to the Antarctic "light regime". Near the pole, night reigns all winter long while in the summer, the sun shines even at midnight.
Professor David Beerling of the University of Sheffield, and author of Emerald Planet, explained the challenge that Antarctic trees must have faced in this unusual environment: "During prolonged periods of warm winter darkness, trees consume their food store," he said. And if this goes on for too long, they will eventually "starve".
To understand how trees survived against the odds, Professor Beerling has been investigating the kinds of plants that once grew on Antarctica. These include trees like the Ginkgo, a living fossil.
"What we did was grow seedlings of these trees in blacked-out greenhouses where we could simulate Antarctic light conditions", he told the BBC.
"We also raised temperature and CO2 concentration to match ancient growing conditions." His experiments showed that trees could cope remarkably well with the strange environment. Although they used up food stores in the winter, they more than made up for this by their ability to photosynthesize 24 hours per day in the summer.
In fact the main problem seems to have been that trees did not know when to stop. "We found that trees made so much food during the summers… that this eventually caused photosynthesis to slow down," Professor Beerling explained. "As a result they couldn't fully take advantage of the long hot summers for photosynthesis".
Dinosaurs in the dark
However, it wasn't just trees that had to find ways to cope with the unusual polar conditions. Amazing fossil discoveries show that dinosaurs foraged in the tangled undergrowth. Professor Thomas Rich of the Victoria Museum, Australia, is a world-famous dinosaur-hunter, responsible for finding several polar dinosaurs.
Over the past 20 years, he has meticulously excavated fossil sites in southern Australia. This region was positioned just off the east coast of Antarctica, 100 million years ago.
His finds raise an interesting question: did Antarctic dinosaurs migrate during the winter, or were they adapted to living in the dark forests of the polar night?
Professor Rich thinks he knows the answer: "The only complete dinosaur skeleton that we've found is Leaellynasaura. What's really unusual about that specimen is the skull. It indicates that the animal had enlarged optic lobes," he explained.
This suggests that polar dinosaurs might have possessed acute 'night-vision' and were well suited to the prolonged winter darkness. What might an encounter with a polar dinosaur have been like?
"Had you seen Leaellynasaura as a silhouette at dawn, you would have been justified in confusing her with a [small kangaroo]," remarked Professor Rich. "She was bipedal with large hind limbs and a long tail." However, it would have been no threat because its teeth show that it fed exclusively on plants.
Emerald Antarctica
Visiting the frozen wasteland of Antarctica today, it is hard to believe that rainforests haunted by small dinosaurs once flourished where 3km thick ice-sheets now exist. However, the geological record provides irrefutable evidence that dramatic climate fluctuations have occurred throughout our planet's history.
Indeed, over the past 50 years, the Antarctic Peninsula has warmed by an alarming 2.8C, faster than any other part of the world. So, if this warming were to continue unabated, could an emerald Antarctica be reborn?
"It is just possible," said Professor Francis. "However, that assumes that plant species are able to migrate across the Southern Ocean from places like South America or Australia," she said.
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