Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Tuesday:
Lihue, Kauai – 81
Honolulu airport, Oahu – 84
Kaneohe, Oahu – 79
Molokai airport – 82
Kahului airport, Maui – 85 (record high Tuesday: 91 – 1969, 1952 )
Kona airport 84
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 Tuesday evening:
Honolulu, Oahu – 84
Hilo, Hawaii – 73
Haleakala Crater – missing (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 34 (over 13,500 feet on the Big Island)
Here are the 24-hour precipitation totals (inches) for each of the islands as of Tuesday evening:
1.31 Mount Waialeale, Kauai
0.40 Oahu Forest NWR, Oahu
0.04 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.00 Kahoolawe
0.76 Puu Kukui, Maui
0.30 Piihonua, Big Island
Marine Winds – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a 1033 millibar high pressure system…to the north-northeast of our islands. Our local winds will remain on the strong and gusty side Wednesday into 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. 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 13,500 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 shining down during the night at times. Plus, during the nights you will be able to see stars, and the sunrise and sunset 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. A satellite image, which shows the entire ocean area between Hawaii and the Mexican coast…can be found here.
Aloha Paragraphs
Trade winds – increasing windward showers /
some locally heavy elsewhere too
Our local winds will remain active from the trade wind direction…becoming slightly stronger through Thursday. Glancing at this weather map, we find a 1033 millibar high pressure system located to our north-northeast…which will remain the source of our trades now. These trade winds will remain active, the small craft wind advisories now includes those windiest coasts and channels from south of Kauai down across Oahu, Maui County and the Big Island. The trade winds will begin relaxing some Friday…then falter more so later this coming weekend into early next week…possibly shifting towards the southeast.
Our trade winds will continue to blow…the following numbers represent the strongest gusts, along with directions early Tuesday evening:
32 Port Allen, Kauai – NE
31 Honolulu, Oahu – E
32 Molokai – NE
39 Kahoolawe – E
37 Kahului, Maui – NE
16 Lanai – NE
39 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 Tuesday night. Looking at this NOAA satellite picture we see that most of the clouds in our area are located over the ocean, although there was a band of clouds which are being carried to the windward sides…on the trade winds. There are a few middle and higher level clouds around the islands now too…along with towering cumulus clouds locally as well. We can use this looping satellite image to see areas of high clouds in some directions. At lower levels of the atmosphere we can see cloud patches upstream of the islands, to the east of the state…which are being carried our way presently. Checking out this looping radar image isn't working correctly at the moment, although showers should be increasing today.
Sunset Commentary: This last day of May should be seeing just a usual trade wind weather pattern, with a few windward showers, although not much rainfall. Using climatology as a guide, we’d be apt to see these conditions sliding right on into June. This year however will be different, and those folks who like to use "global climate change" as a catch all for these unusual situations…could easily hang their hat on that peg. The next example, of the abnormal weather conditions that we’ve seen this year, is shifting over the islands now, and will continue through the rest of this work week.
This will be mainly be due to the arrival of a cold pool of air over the state, migrating over us from the northeast. This upper level low pressure system will bring an unstable air mass overhead. This in turn will act to enhance whatever showers that happen to be around through Friday. As the trade winds are blowing now, pretty robustly as a matter of fact…there will be windward biased showers in general. At the same time, with all that cold air aloft, there could be some locally heavy showers around just about anywhere through Friday as well. There may even be a chance of very late season snow atop the summits on the Big Island! Not yet however…at least at the time of this writing…at which point the air temperature on Mauna Kea was 30F degrees.
The daytime heating of the islands, aided by having the sun just about straight up at noon, will trigger some localized heavy downpours over the leeward slopes during the afternoon hours. There is even the chance of a few thunderstorms in this mix through Thursday, especially on the Big Island. Actually, it appeared that there was some thunder brewing on the Big Island slopes….and around Kauai earlier too – those bright white cloud areas. This will be interesting to track over the next few days, and could be a major boon in terms of precipitation…as we head into our dry summer season.
Here in Kihei, Maui at 530pm Tuesday evening, skies were clear to partly cloudy, with fairly light trade wind breezes from my vantage point. The Pacific Disaster Center is upslope from the beaches, so sometimes the winds are light here, and much stronger down at the coast. At any rate, today was pretty nice, considering what might be coming our way over the next couple of days. Given the fact that tomorrow is the first day of June, it's pretty weird to have such late season inclement weather circumstances on our doorstep. By the way, many areas will remain quite nice, while other areas will find rainfall. I'm quite sure it will be a hit and miss affair however, rather than a widespread rain event. I'll be back early Wednesday morning with your next new weather narrative, with more updates at around 530am HST. I hope you have a great Tuesday night until then! Aloha for now…Glenn.
Extra: Just so we can see, there's no snow yet on the summit of Mauna Kea – although a winter weather Advisory will be started at 6am Wednesday through 6pm that evening…for snowfall accumulation.
Interesting: For something that's so often mixed with anti-caking agents, salt takes a lot of lumps in the American imagination. Like fat, people tend to think of it as an unnecessary additive — something to be avoided by seeking out processed foods that are "free" of it. But also like fat, salt is an essential component of the human diet — one that has been transformed into unhealthy forms by the food industry.
Historically, though, salt was prized. Its reputation can be found in phrases like, "Worth one's salt," meaning, "Worth one's pay," since people were often paid in salt and the word itself is derived from the Latin salarium, or salary.
Those days are long over. Doctors and dietitians, along with the USDA dietary guidelines, recommend eating a diet low in sodium to prevent high blood pressure, risk of cardiovascular disease, and stroke; and doctors have been putting their patients on low-salt diets since the 1970s.
But a new study, published in the May 4 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), found that low-salt diets actually increase the risk of death from heart attack and stroke — and in fact don't prevent high blood pressure. The study's findings inspired much criticism and controversy — as research that challenges conventional dietary wisdom often does.
When The New York Times briefly reported on it, even the title conveyed the controversy: "Low-Sat Diet Ineffective, Study Finds. Disagreement Abounds." The Times reports that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention "felt so strongly that the study was flawed that they criticized it in an interview, something they normally do not do."
According to the Times, Peter Briss, a medical director at the Centers, said that the study was small, that its subjects were young, and that they had few cardiovascular events — making it hard to draw conclusions.
Interesting2: Greenhouse gas emissions increased by a record amount last year, to the highest carbon output in history, putting hopes of holding global warming to safe levels all but out of reach, according to unpublished estimates from the International Energy Agency. The shock rise means the goal of preventing a temperature rise of more than 2 degrees Celsius — which scientists say is the threshold for potentially 'dangerous climate change' — is likely to be just 'a nice Utopia', according to Fatih Birol, chief economist of the IEA.
It also shows the most serious global recession for 80 years has had only a minimal effect on emissions, contrary to some predictions. Last year, a record 30.6 gigatons of carbon dioxide poured into the atmosphere, mainly from burning fossil fuel — a rise of 1.6Gt on 2009, according to estimates from the IEA regarded as the gold standard for emissions data.
'I am very worried. This is the worst news on emissions,' Birol told the Guardian. 'It is becoming extremely challenging to remain below 2 degrees. The prospect is getting bleaker. That is what the numbers say.'
Interesting3: A cold snap in Greenland in the 12th century may help explain why Viking settlers vanished from the island, scientists said on Monday. The report, reconstructing temperatures by examining lake sediment cores in west Greenland dating back 5,600 years, also indicated that earlier, pre-historic settlers also had to contend with vicious swings in climate on icy Greenland.
"Climate played (a) big role in Vikings' disappearance from Greenland," Brown University in the United States said in a statement of a finding that average temperatures plunged 4 degrees Celsius (7F) in 80 years from about 1100. Such a shift is roughly the equivalent of the current average temperatures in Edinburgh, Scotland, tumbling to match those in Reykjavik, Iceland.
It would be a huge setback to crop and livestock production. "There is a definite cooling trend in the region right before the Norse disappear," said William D'Andrea of Brown University, the lead author of the study in the U.S. journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Researchers have scant written or archaeological records to figure out why Viking settlers abandoned colonies on the western side of the island in the mid-1300s and the eastern side in the early 1400s.
Conflicts with indigenous Inuit, a search for better hunting grounds, economic stresses and natural swings in climate, perhaps caused by shifts in the sun's output or volcanic eruptions, could all be factors.
Scientists have previously suspected that a cooling toward a "Little Ice Age" from the 1400s gradually shortened growing seasons and added to sea ice that hampered sailing links with Iceland or the Nordic nations.
Interesting4: Higher temperatures have already led to lower summer sea ice levels in the Arctic and the melting has the potential to increase access for fishermen, tourists and oil and natural gas developers to coastal regions in coming decades. The melting has also led to hopes that shorter Arctic shipping routes between China and Europe will open.
The Arctic is increasingly a region of deep strategic importance to the United States, Russia and China for its undiscovered resource riches and the potential for new shipping lanes. The U.S. Geological Survey says that 25 percent of the world's undiscovered oil and natural gas lies in the Arctic.
But the warming also will likely melt so-called "ice roads", the temporary winter roads developers now use to access far inland northern resources such as timber, diamonds and minerals, according to a study published on Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change.
"It's a resource frontier where we don't even know what all is there and I'm beginning to think we never will," Lawrence Smith, a professor of geography at the University of California Los Angeles and a co-author of the study, said about the Arctic interior.
"These places are going to become wilder and the lands are going to be abandoned and revert to a wild state." The ice roads, made famous by the History Channel show "Ice Road Truckers", are constructed on frozen ground, rivers, lakes and swampy areas using compacted snow and ice.
They cost only about two to four percent of what permanent land roads would cost, making resource extraction more cost effective in these remote areas. As the roads melt, indigenous populations could also face increased isolation and higher costs as some goods could only reach them via airplanes.
All eight countries that border the Arctic — Canada, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the United States — are expected to experience declines in winter-road land accessibility.
Russia will lose the most land suitable for winter road construction by area, followed by Canada and the United States, according to the modeling done in the study, which was supported by NASA's Cryosphere Program and the National Science Foundation.
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