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

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

Lihue, Kauai –                   81
Honolulu airport, Oahu –     82
Kaneohe, Oahu –               80
Molokai airport –                82
Kahului airport, Maui –       85
Kona airport –                   83
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:

Port Allen, Kauai – 81F
Kaneohe, Oahu – 79

Haleakala Crater –     missing (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 43 (under 14,000 feet on the Big Island)

Precipitation Totals – The following numbers represent the largest precipitation totals Monday evening:

0.20    Kalaheo, Kauai
0.01    Ahuimanu Loop, Oahu
0.00    Molokai
0.00    Lanai
0.00    Kahoolawe
0.01    Haiku, Maui
0.05    Honaunau, Big Island

Marine Winds – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a 1027 millibar trade wind maintaining high pressure system, with its associated ridge running west towards Hawaii…just to the north of the islands. Our trade winds will be strengthening later Tuesday into Wednesday.

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 ended November 30th here in the central Pacific…and begins again June 1st.

 Aloha Paragraphs

Very large surf on the north shores…increasing trades
 
 

 

The trade winds will be increasing by mid-week through the rest of the week…continuing on into the following week.  According to this weather map, we find a 1027 millibar high pressure to our east-northeast…with its associated ridge of high pressure just north of the islands Monday night. Our trade winds will remain light to moderately strong into Tuesday morning. The outlook continues to show the trade winds picking up again into mid-week, becoming blustery through the weekend. The longer range forecast shows the trade winds continuing on into next week.      

Increasingly strong trade winds on the horizon…the following numbers represent the strongest gusts, along with directions Monday evening:

23 mph       Port Allen, Kauai – SE
18              Kahuku, Oahu – NE
12              Molokai – NE 
27              Kahoolawe – E
25              Kahului, Maui – NE
14              Lanai Airport – NNE
29                South Point, Big Island – NE

We can use the following links to see what’s going on in our area of the north central Pacific Ocean Monday night. This large University of Washington satellite image shows lots of high and middle level clouds being carried along in the jet stream winds to our north. Looking at this NOAA satellite picture, we see minor patches of low level clouds offshore from the state, although most of the islands remain generally quite clear. We can use this looping satellite image to see low clouds are moving westward in the trade wind flow, although as noted above…there aren’t many clouds to our east at the moment. Checking out this looping radar image, shows that there are practically no showers around Monday night…just a few passing south of the Big Island.

The overlying atmosphere remains dry and stable, limiting the amount of clouds and showers in our area.  As the trade winds increase late Tuesday into Wednesday, and remain stronger through most of the next 10 days…we'll see showers being brought in our direction at times. These will fall generally along the windward sides, although as the trade winds reach their high points, in terms of strength…we could see showers being carried over into the leeward sides on the smaller islands. There is still no definite end to the ongoing late winter trade wind regime. This unusually strong and gusty trade wind episode could trigger wind advisories over the islands in places, as well as possible high wind warning conditions too. The major channels between the islands may see a gale warning going up by Wednesday or Thursday.

Besides the stronger trade winds arriving by mid-week, the other big news in the marine environment will be the unusually high surf…making for dangerous conditions on our north and west shores for the most part. These waves have made high surf warnings necessary, and will create a hazard to the average citizen going into the ocean. I would highly recommend that folks head to the south facing leeward beaches, if they want to go into the ocean safely. The west and north shores, and locally along the east shores too, will be where only the most expert ocean users will be welcome. Those folks too should use extra caution when getting into this much larger than normal surf. 

Here in Kihei, Maui at around 530pm, skies were clear to partly cloudy, with still trade winds on the light side. Looking up towards the Haleakala Crater, there were cloudy skies, although those clouds don't look like wet ones at all.  At noted above, Tuesday will be a transition day, as the trade wind crank up to be blustery by Wednesday onwards. The surf conditions will be out of control beginning Wednesday, that is for almost everyone but the most advanced surfers. Again, head to the south facing leeward beaches for your best bet for sun and safer surf conditions. I'll be back early Tuesday morning with your next new weather narrative. I hope you have a great Monday night until then! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Extra: Helicopter footage of the tsunami on Maui on youtube

Extra2: youtube video footage of the terrible tsunami damage in Japan

Extra3: Incredible story, photographs, and video footage of the devastation in Japan!

Interesting: Last week's devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan has actually moved the island closer to the United States and shifted the planet's axis. The quake caused a rift 15 miles below the sea floor that stretched 186 miles long and 93 miles wide, according to the AP. The areas closest to the epicenter of the quake jumped a full 13 feet closer to the United States, geophysicist Ross Stein at the United States Geological Survey told The New York Times.

The world's fifth-largest, 8.8 magnitude quake was caused when the Pacific tectonic plate dived under the North American plate, which shifted Eastern Japan towards North America by about 13 feet (see NASA's before and after photos at right). The quake also shifted the earth's axis by 6.5 inches, shortened the day by 1.6 microseconds, and sank Japan downward by about two feet. As Japan's eastern coastline sunk, the tsunami's waves rolled in.

Why did the quake shorten the day?  The earth's mass shifted towards the center, spurring the planet to spin a bit faster. Last year's massive 8.8 magnitude earthquake in Chile also shortened the day, but by an even smaller fraction of a second. The 2004 Sumatra quake knocked a whopping 6.8 micro-seconds off the day.

After the country's 1995 earthquake, Japan placed high-tech sensors around the country to observe even the slightest movements, which is why scientists are able to calculate the quake's impact down to the inch. "This is overwhelmingly the best-recorded great earthquake ever," Lucy Jones, chief scientist for the Multi-Hazards project at the U.S. Geological Survey, told The Boston Herald.

The tsunami's waves necessitated life-saving evacuations as far away as Chile. Fisherman off the coast of Mexico reported a banner fishing day Friday, and speculated that the tsunami knocked sealife in their direction.

Interesting2: As the scale of Japan’s nuclear crisis begins to come to light, experts in Japan and the United States say the country is now facing a cascade of accumulating problems that suggest that radioactive releases of steam from the crippled plants could go on for weeks or even months. The emergency flooding of stricken reactors with seawater and the resulting steam releases are a desperate step intended to avoid a much bigger problem: a full meltdown of the nuclear cores in reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.

On Monday, an explosion blew the roof off the second reactor, not damaging the core, officials said, but presumably leaking more radiation. Later Monday, the government said cooling systems at a third reactor had failed. The Kyodo news agency reported that the damaged fuel rods at the third reactor had been temporarily exposed, increasing the risk of overheating.

Sea water was being channeled into the reactor to cover the rods, Kyodo reported. So far, Japanese officials have said the melting of the nuclear cores in the two plants is assumed to be “partial,” and the amount of radioactivity measured outside the plants, though twice the level Japan considers safe, has been relatively modest.

But Pentagon officials reported Sunday that helicopters flying 60 miles from the plant picked up small amounts of radioactive particulates — still being analyzed, but presumed to include cesium-137 and iodine-121 — suggesting widening environmental contamination.

In a country where memories of a nuclear horror of a different sort in the last days of World War II weigh heavily on the national psyche and national politics, the impact of continued venting of long-lasting radioactivity from the plants is hard to overstate.

Japanese reactor operators now have little choice but to periodically release radioactive steam as part of an emergency cooling process for the fuel of the stricken reactors that may continue for a year or more even after fission has stopped.

The plant’s operator must constantly try to flood the reactors with seawater, then release the resulting radioactive steam into the atmosphere, several experts familiar with the design of the Daiichi facility said.

That suggests that the tens of thousands of people who have been evacuated may not be able to return to their homes for a considerable period, and that shifts in the wind could blow radioactive materials toward Japanese cities rather than out to sea.

Re-establishing normal cooling of the reactors would require restoring electric power — which was cut in the earthquake and tsunami — and now may require plant technicians working in areas that have become highly contaminated with radioactivity.

More steam releases also mean that the plume headed across the Pacific could continue to grow. On Sunday evening, the White House sought to tamp down concerns, saying that modeling done by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had concluded that “Hawaii, Alaska, the U.S. Territories and the U.S. West Coast are not expected to experience any harmful levels of radioactivity.”

But all weekend, after a series of intense interchanges between Tokyo and Washington and the arrival of the first American nuclear experts in Japan, officials said they were beginning to get a clearer picture of what went wrong over the past three days. And as one senior official put it, “under the best scenarios, this isn’t going to end anytime soon.”

The essential problem is the definition of “off” in a nuclear reactor. When the nuclear chain reaction is stopped and the reactor shuts down, the fuel is still producing about 6 percent as much heat as it did when it was running, caused by continuing radioactivity, the release of subatomic particles and of gamma rays.

Usually when a reactor is first shut down, an electric pump pulls heated water from the vessel to a heat exchanger, and cool water from a river or ocean is brought in to draw off that heat. But at the Japanese reactors, after losing electric power, that system could not be used. Instead the operators are dumping seawater into the vessel and letting it cool the fuel by boiling.

But as it boils, pressure rises too high to pump in more water, so they have to vent the vessel to the atmosphere, and feed in more water, a procedure known as “feed and bleed.” When the fuel was intact, the steam they were releasing had only modest amounts of radioactive material, in a non-troublesome form. With damaged fuel, that steam is getting dirtier.

Another potential concern is that some Japanese reactors (as well as some in France and Germany) run on a mixed fuel known as mox, or mixed oxide, that includes reclaimed plutonium. It is not clear whether the stricken reactors are among those, but if they are, the steam they release could be more toxic.

Christopher D. Wilson, a reactor operator and later a manager at Exelon’s Oyster Creek plant, near Toms River, N.J., said, “normally you would just re-establish electricity supply, from the on-site diesel generator or a portable one.” Portable generators have been brought into Fukushima, he said.

Fukushima was designed by General Electric, as Oyster Creek was around the same time, and the two plants are similar. The problem, he said, was that the hookup is done through electric switching equipment that is in a basement room flooded by the tsunami, he said.

“Even though you have generators on site, you have to get the water out of the basement,” he said. Another nuclear engineer with long experience in reactors of this type, who now works for a government agency, was emphatic. “To completely stop venting, they’re going to have to put some sort of equipment back in service,” he said.

He asked not to be named because his agency had not authorized him to speak. The central problem arises from a series of failures that began after the tsunami. It easily overcame the sea walls surrounding the Fukushima plant.

It swamped the diesel generators, which were placed in a low-lying area, apparently because of misplaced confidence that the sea walls would protect them. At 3:41 p.m. Friday, roughly an hour after the quake and just around the time the region would have been struck by the giant waves, the generators shut down.

According to Tokyo Electric Power Company, the plant switched to an emergency cooling system that operates on batteries, but these were soon depleted. Inside the plant, according to industry executives and American experts who received briefings over the weekend, there was deep concern that spent nuclear fuel that was kept in a “cooling pond” inside one of the plants had been exposed and begun letting off potentially deadly gamma radiation.

Then water levels inside the reactor cores began to fall. While estimates vary, several officials and industry experts said Sunday that the top four to nine feet of the nuclear fuel in the core and control rods appear to have been exposed to the air — a condition that that can quickly lead to melting, and ultimately to full meltdown.

At 8 p.m., just as Americans were waking up to news of the earthquake, the government declared an emergency, contradicting its earlier reassurances that there were no major problems. But the chief cabinet secretary, Yukio Edano, stressed that there had been no radiation leak. But one was coming: Workers inside the reactors saw that levels of coolant water were dropping.

They did not know how severely. “The gauges that measure the water level don’t appear to be giving accurate readings,” one American official said. What the workers knew by Saturday morning was that cooling systems at a nearby power plant, Fukushima Daini, were also starting to fail, for many of the same reasons.

And the pressure in the No. 1 reactor at Fukushima Daiichi was rising so fast that engineers knew they would have to relieve it by letting steam escape. Shortly before 4 p.m., camera crews near the Daiichi plant captured what appears to have been an explosion at the No. 1 reactor — apparently caused by a buildup of hydrogen.

It was dramatic television but not especially dangerous — except to the workers injured by the force of the blast. The explosion was in the outer container, leaving the main reactor vessel unharmed, according to Tokyo Electric’s reports to the International Atomic Energy Agency. (The walls of the outer building blew apart, as they are designed to do, rather than allow a buildup of pressure that could damage the reactor vessel.)

But the dramatic blast was also a warning sign of what could happen inside the reactor vessel if the core was not cooled. The International Atomic Energy Agency said that “as a countermeasure to limit damage to the reactor core,” Tokyo Electric proposed injecting seawater mixed with boron — which can choke off a nuclear reaction — and it began to do that at 10:20 p.m. Saturday.

It was a desperation move: The corrosive seawater will essentially disable the 40-year-old plant; the decision to flood the core amounted to a decision to abandon the facility. But even that operation has not been easy. To pump in the water, the Japanese have apparently tried used firefighting equipment — hardly the usual procedure.

But forcing the seawater inside the containment vessel has been difficult because the pressure in the vessel has become so great. One American official likened the process to “trying to pour water into an inflated balloon,” and said that on Sunday it was “not clear how much water they are getting in, or whether they are covering the cores.”

The problem was compounded because gauges in the reactor seemed to have been damaged in the earthquake or tsunami, making it impossible to know just how much water is in the core. And workers at the pumping operation are presumed to be exposed to radiation; several workers, according to Japanese reports, have been treated for radiation poisoning. It is not clear how severe their exposure was.