Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs / February 14-15, 2011

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

Lihue, Kauai –                   78
Honolulu airport, Oahu –     80
Kaneohe, Oahu –               78
Molokai airport –                80
Kahului airport, Maui –       82
Kona airport –                   78
Hilo airport, Hawaii –          82

Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level – and on the highest mountain tops…as of 5pm Monday evening:

Honolulu, Oahu –  80F
Lihue, Kauai – 75

Haleakala Crater –     missing (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – missing (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 Monday evening:

2.22 Kalaheo, Kauai  
0.59 Schofield South, Oahu
0.00 Molokai 
0.00 Lanai
0.00 Kahoolawe
0.76 Oheo Gulch, Maui
0.75 Kona airport, Big Island

Marine Winds – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a 1036 millibar high pressure system far to our north-northwest. At the same time we find a dissipating cold front moving gradually north. Our winds will be south to southeast through mid-week. 

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

Happy Valentines Day!

Our local winds will generally be quite light from the south to southeast, potentially picking up some during the second half of the week…as a cold front to our northwest gets closer to Kauai. This weather map shows a 1036 millibar high pressure system far to our north-northwest. Winds are coming in from the south to southeast now, and will remain from these directions much of this work week. This will bring widespread and locally thick volcanic haze back into our Hawaiian Islands weather picture through the near term future.

Winds will remain on the light side in general, locally a bit stronger…the following numbers represent the strongest gusts, along with directions early Monday evening:

20 mph        Barking Sands, Kauai – SE
16              Kahuku, Oahu – ENE
05              Molokai – SE
14              Kahoolawe – SE
06              Kapalua, Maui 
05              Lanai Airport – SSE
18              South Point, Big Island – NE

We can use the following links to see what’s going on in our local skies Monday afternoon. This large University of Washington satellite image shows lots of clouds over the ocean to our west through north…associated with a deep low pressure system to the northwest. Looking at this NOAA satellite picture, we those thick high and middle levels clouds coming in over our islands from the west and northwest. We can use this looping satellite image to see those streaks of cirrus arriving over most of the state…some of which are quite thick, while filtering and dimming our sunshine during the dayes. The positive side of this is that these are the kinds of clouds that can give us our nice sunrise and sunset colors. Checking out this looping radar image, it shows that most of the showers, very few that there were early this evening, were moving north and northwest, most notably near Oahu and Kauai at the time of this writing. Early Monday evening saw the NWS put out a flood advisory for the heavy showers occurring on parts of Oahu, which expires at 8pm…and did in fact expire.

An area of drier air just to our east is heading towards the islands, which will work to limit our afternoon showers…at least compared to the last several days. As the winds remain light, and there is still some residual moisture around…the interior sections of the islands will likely see a few showers developing under the influence of daytime heating. This mildly convective weather pattern will continue to some extent as we move through the first half of this work week, with the continued chance of a locally heavy shower popping up here and there. This week will be volcanically hazy, with light to moderately strong south to southeast breezes blowing. This vog will be rather widespread and locally quite dense on some of the islands. 

In sum: generally light to moderately strong south to southeast winds will blow this week, with a few showers, increasing towards the end of the work week on the Kauai end of the chain…and again that volcanic haze will prevail.  The days will likely start off in a clear to partly cloudy way, with afternoon clouds forming over and around the slopes through mid-week. These clouds won't be as productive, in terms of showers, as they have been lately. The large and deep low pressure system to our west won't bother us for the time being. This weather feature could however send a cold front our way later in the week. The latest computer forecast models are suggesting that this frontal boundary will edge up close to Kauai with time. The question remains whether this front will bring rain to just Kauai, and perhaps Oahu…or move even a bit further east into the state? 

~~~ Here in Kihei, Maui at around 530pm, it was generally cloudy and voggy. The high cirrus clouds were helping to mute our sunshine too, so that Monday was mostly cloudy, with a minimum amount of encouraging beach time available. The morning hours will be the best time to head to the ocean, as clouds will increase during the late mornings into the early evening hours. Today is Valentines Day, so please allow me to wish all of you lovely ladies again…a most wonderful heart felt evening! At 815pm, a shower started falling here in Kula, which is a bit unusual. I'll be back first thing Tuesday morning with your next new weather narrative. Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting: There is bad news on the global food front. In an alert issued this week, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned that more than two-thirds of China's gigantic wheat crop may be under risk "because of substantially below-normal rainfall" this winter. The affected areas in the northern plains of China produced over 75 million ton of China's total production of 112 million ton of wheat last year. Any shortfall in Chinese production would have serial effects on availability and prices of wheat around the world.

Global food prices have been silently climbing upward through the past six months and with production and consumption very finely balanced, any disruption in production may wreak havoc with prices. Already, food prices are touching the record levels set in 2008 although prices of rice—the world's largest staple food— are still below those levels.

High food prices have been feeding growing restlessness and anger in a swathe of countries including West Asia. Egypt had experienced an 18.5% rate of inflation driving up prices of all food commodities except bread which is subsidized by the government to the tune of $1.5 billion annually.

This was a major contributory factor to the 18-day uprising that dislodged the three-decade-long dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak. Protests against high food prices have taken place in Oman, Israel and Jordan and have contributed to political unrest in Yemen, Tunisia and Algeria. Wheat flour prices were 16% higher than a year ago in China driven by fears of drought.

The Chinese government has announced a $1.96-billion package to fight drought, including attempts to create artificial rain by cloud seeding. Apart from staples, sugar prices are running at 30-year highs. Weather-related disruption in Australia, Brazil and China has caused international refined sugar prices to reach 35.6 cents per pound. The average price for sugar in 2010 was 27.78 cents per pound.

The last time sugar prices reached these sky-high levels was in 1980. Meanwhile, the World Sugar Committee, representing leading traders, wrote to the ICE futures commodity exchange blaming parasitic speculators for the high prices of sugar.

Nervous governments across the world are trying to stem the tide in different ways. Several countries in West Asia are stocking up on food grain. Iraq, where agricultural production has declined considerably, has placed orders for 300,000 ton of wheat from the US, with options for another 100,000 ton. Jordan and Lebanon submitted tenders for 100,000 ton and 22,500 ton respectively.

Algeria, Tunisia and Saudi Arabia too placed large orders recently. Others, like Russia, have banned exports. Vietnam has devalued its currency, the dong, by 9% to curb inflation. All these point to an impending crisis in food availability and prices that could lead to further turmoil globally.

Interesting2: In search of a sustainable alternative to dumping at sea or disposal on land, a Scandinavian consortium blended contaminated sediment with a special mix of binders to produce a safe construction material for use in ports and harbors. Stricter regulations have reduced the use of hazardous chemicals and heavy metals in industrial activities, but their legacy lives on in the environment, notably in polluted soils and sediments.

One sector where they present a particular headache is in the shipping and port industry, where dredging routinely turns up sediment contaminated with the likes of carcinogenic PCBs, TBT, cadmium, lead and mercury.

Port owners are caught between constraints on dumping sediment at sea, the cheap but polluting option, and removing it to be treated for landfill, an expensive alternative.

Enter a recent EUREKA project, STABCON, in which a Swedish-Norwegian consortium — of research bodies, binder manufacturers, port authorities and design consultants — sought to adapt the 'stabilization and solidification' method to treat polluted sediments and other dredged material commonly found in Scandinavia.

Having worked together on an earlier study into the potential of the stabilization and solidification technique in Sweden for the country's environment protection agency, the project participants teamed up to test the method in a pilot study and draw up guidelines for ports.

A cost-effective solution Led by Merox, a subsidiary of Swedish steelmaker Svenskt Stål AB (SSAB), they first compared the three alternatives for handling sediments — dumping, solidification and stabilization, and dredging and disposing on land — from a sustainability perspective.

Stabilization and solidification proved to be a sustainable and cost-effective solution. Contaminated sediments are mixed, on site, with products that bind it to create a solid material that contains the hazardous substances.

As well as being more environmentally friendly than dumping and cheaper than land filling, "this method offers a number of additional benefits," explained Göran Holm, R&D director of the Swedish Geotechnical Institute, one of the project partners.

"It reduces the demand for natural resources, such as blasted rock; and by treating the sediments in situ and using them in port areas, the need for transport is reduced, along with the associated health risks."

Supported by funding from EUREKA member countries, the project partners conducted tests in a pilot project to identify the most suitable binder composition and ideal mixing procedure for a variety of contaminants and sediment types.

Researchers observed the behavior of the treated sediment for leakage, permeability, strength and durability. The binder they used was a mixture of cement and a Merox product, Merit 5000, a derivative from the steel-making process. The slag is able to bind heavy metals chemically at the same time as it cures.

Putting it to the test The final step of the project translated the results into a report and guidelines for port authorities, to enable them to assess options for using stabilization and solidification and select the best binder for their local conditions, while providing design principles for using treated sediments in harbor structures, such as paved areas, loading zones and buildings.

The STABCON test site was the Swedish port of Oxelösund, itself a partner in the project. The port wanted to build a new harbor area, and needed to remove contaminated sediment while at the same time respecting Sweden's strict environmental regulations.

Its aim was to dredge a section of harbor and treat the sediment for use in the new land area. The team dredged about 500 cubic meters of soft sediment, and strengthened it with a mix of cement and Merit 5000. They placed the composition on gravel and sand, and studied its properties, taking samples and conducting laboratory tests for leakage, including in nearby waters. The results were impressive.

Once stabilized, there was no degradation from a chemical point of view, and no physical damage either. The new material also passed the test for durability. "We are pretty confident that it will last for the long term," said Therese Stark, a research and development engineer at Merox.

"The main thing is to keep the sediments in as natural an environment as possible, which you can't do if you take them away to deposit elsewhere. We are trying to keep them as they were in the ocean." Key to the outcome of the project was a close working relationship between partners and the expertise that each brought to the table. An expanding market "The work was very successful.

We had a very strong consortium," reflected Göran Holm. "It included manufacturers of binders, like Merox and Cementa, research organizations, consultancies that took charge of design, a harbor with polluted sediment and contractors that performed the test."

Working in symbiosis, the research bodies gained expertise in the technical and environmental area, and in support for decision-making, while the industrial partners gained insight into how their products could be used to greater effect: "We all have a lot more knowledge about how to treat sediments with proportions of binders for different pollutants," says Therese Stark of Merox.

Interesting3: Earth's global temperature has been rising gradually over the last decades, but the warming has not been the same everywhere. Scientists are therefore trying to pin down how the warming has affected regional climates because that is what really matters to people, and to adaptation and mitigation strategies.

Their efforts, however, had hit a roadblock because the necessary observations of the winds over the oceans were biased. Developing a new method to remove the bias, Hiroki Tokinaga and Shang-Ping Xie at the International Pacific Research Center, University of Hawaii at Manoa, found that their corrected observations show the trade winds in the tropical Atlantic have weakened and the pattern of ocean surface temperature has changed.

As a result, the equatorial Amazon and the Guinea Coast are seeing more rainfall and the Sahel less. The findings are published online in the February 6, 2011, issue of Nature Geoscience. The raw observations of winds over the ocean suggest that the winds have grown stronger during the last 60 years.

The trend is, however, largely due to a change in the placement of the anemometers, the instruments measuring wind speed. Ships are the main source of wind data over the ocean, and ships have increased in height and so has the anemometer placement. Tokinaga and Xie corrected this wind bias using wind-wave heights.

The tropical Atlantic has three major ship routes along which ships provide meteorological data. Applying their new correction technique to observations along these routes from 1950 to 2009 together with other observations, they found the trade winds in the tropical Atlantic had weakened significantly during this period.

Although ocean surface temperature in the tropical Atlantic has risen, the pattern has changed and with it the climate. The cold tongue of water that stretches out from the eastern tropical Atlantic coast has warmed more than the western part of the basin. At the same time, the weakened trade winds have resulted in less upwelling of cold water and nutrients in the eastern tropical Atlantic. These latter changes could impact marine life.

Interesting4: Thawing permafrost is triggering mudslides onto a key road traveled by busloads of sightseers. Tall bushes newly sprouted on the tundra are blocking panoramic views. And glaciers are receding from convenient viewing areas, while their rapid summer melt poses new flood risks.

These are just a few of the ways that a rapidly warming climate is reshaping Denali, Kenai Fjords and other national parks comprising the crown jewels of Alaska's heritage as America's last frontier.

These and some better-known impacts — proliferation of invasive plants and fish, greater frequency and intensity of wildfires, and declines in wildlife populations that depend on sea ice and glaciers — are outlined in a recent National Park Service report.

Since the mid-1970s, Alaska has warmed at three times the rate of the Lower 48 states, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. And with nearly two-thirds of U.S. national parkland located in Alaska, the issue of climate change is especially pressing there, officials say.

In some far northern parks such as Gates of the Arctic, average temperatures are expected to shift in coming years from below freezing to above freezing, crossing a crucial threshold, said Bob Winfree, Alaska science adviser for the Park Service. "The effects of melting ice and thawing permafrost, I think, will be major," Winfree said.

Winfree is helping lead a new three-year, $500,000 climate scenario project in Alaska intended to identify and cope with the warming trend. That is part of a $10 million program to plan for and mitigate climate change in parks nationwide.

Interesting5: The Moon, Earth's closest neighbor, has long been studied to help us better understand our own planet. Of particular interest is the lunar interior, which could hold clues to its ancient origins. In an attempt to extract information on the very deep interior of the Moon, a team of NASA-led researchers applied new technology to old data.

Apollo seismic data was reanalyzed using modern methodologies and detected what many scientists have predicted: the Moon has a core. According to the team's findings, published Jan. 6 in the online edition of Science, the Moon possesses an iron-rich core with a solid inner ball nearly 150 miles in radius, and a 55-mile thick outer fluid shell.

"The Moon's deepest interior, especially whether or not it has a core, has been a blind spot for seismologists," says Ed Garnero, a professor at the School of Earth and Space Exploration in ASU's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. "The seismic data from the old Apollo missions were too noisy to image the Moon with any confidence.

Other types of information have inferred the presence of a lunar core, but the details on its size and composition were not well constrained." Sensitive seismographs scattered across Earth make studying our planet's interior possible. After earthquakes these instruments record waves that travel through the interior of the planet, which help to determine the structure and composition of Earth's layers.

Just as geoscientists study earthquakes to learn about the structure of Earth, seismic waves of "moonquakes" (seismic events on the Moon) can be analyzed to probe the lunar interior.

When Garnero and his graduate student Peiying (Patty) Lin heard about research being done to hunt for the core of the Moon by lead author Renee Weber at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, they suggested that array processing might be an effective approach, a method where seismic recordings are added together in a special way and studied in concert.

The multiple recordings processed together allow researchers to extract very faint signals. The depth of layers that reflect seismic energy can be identified, ultimately signifying the composition and state of matter at varying depths. "Array processing methods can enhance faint, hard-to-detect seismic signals by adding seismograms together.

If seismic wave energy goes down and bounces off of some deep interface at a particular depth, like the Moon's core-mantle boundary, then that signal "echo" should be present in all the recordings, even if below the background noise level. But when we add the signals together, that core reflection amplitude becomes visible, which lets us map the deep Moon," explains Lin, who is also one of the paper's authors.

The team found the deepest interior of the moon to have considerable structural similarities with the Earth. Their work suggests that the lunar core contains a small percentage of light elements such as sulfur, similar to light elements in Earth's core — sulfur, oxygen and others.

"There are a lot of exciting things happening with the Moon, like Professor Mark Robinson's LRO mission producing hi-res photos of amazing phenomena. However, just as with Earth, there is much we don't know about the lunar interior, and that information is key to deciphering the origin and evolution of the Moon, including the very early Earth," explains Garnero.

Interesting6: A 3-foot snowfall along South Korea's east coast necessitated the government rescue of stranded motorists and residents in remote villages, officials say. Officials from the Gangwon provincial government said they mobilized about 22,600 people, 1,750 snowplows and other equipment to clear snow from roads and highways.

Prime Minister Kim Hwang-sik ordered authorities to make rapid damage assessments and help people in heavily snow-impacted areas such as rural villages in Gangwon province, the Yonhap News Agency reported Monday. The record amount of almost 1 yard of snow that fell during the weekend included 31 inches of snow on Friday — the heaviest single-day Korean record since meteorologists began compiling records in 1911.

This is the biggest snowfall in a century, Yonhap said. There were about 80 flights canceled and 40 delayed at Gimhae International Airport with accompanying road closures in and around the nearby port city of Busan. About 146 remote village households in Gangwon province remained isolated Monday because of heavy snow, officials said.