Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs / July 7-8, 2011

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

Lihue, Kauai –                    85                  
Honolulu airport, Oahu –     87 (record for Thursday – 91 in 1984, 1995)
Kaneohe, Oahu –                82
Molokai airport –                 84
Kahului airport, Maui –             83   
Kona airport                       82  
Hilo airport, Hawaii –           77

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

Barking Sands, Kauai  – 87
Hilo, Hawaii – 74

Haleakala Crater –     50 (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 Thursday evening:  

1.95     Mount Waialeale, Kauai
1.53     South Fork Kaukonahua, Oahu
0.35     Molokai
0.00     Lanai
0.00     Kahoolawe
4.21     Puu Kukui, Maui
1.64     Kawainui Stream, Big Island

Marine Winds – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing high pressure systems to the north through north-northeast of our islands. Our local trade winds will remain rather strong and gusty Friday…slightly less so Saturday.

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.  Here's a tropical cyclone tracking map for the eastern and central Pacific.

 Aloha Paragraphs

Trade wind weather pattern…windward showers
High Surf Advisory south shores

The trade winds will continue blowing, remaining on the strong side into Friday…then pulling back slightly over the weekend into early next week.  Glancing at this weather map, we find high pressure systems located to the north through north-northeast of the islands Thursday night. The location of these high pressure centers, will keep our trade winds blowing…becoming a little stronger even into Friday. The summits on Maui and the Big Island have an active wind advisory, where winds of 30-40 mph are expected through tonight.

Our trade winds will remain active…the following numbers represent the strongest gusts (mph), along with directions Thursday evening: 

35                 Port Allen, Kauai – NE  
32                 Kahuku, Oahu – NE 
31                 Molokai – NE 
37                 Kahoolawe – ESE 
36                 Kahului – ESE
23                 Lanai – NE   
51                    Kawaihae, Big Island – E 

We can use the following links to see what’s going on in our area of the north central Pacific Ocean Thursday night.  Looking at this NOAA satellite picture we find cumulus clouds banked up against the windward side of the Big Island…with the other islands finding scattered clouds. We can use this looping satellite image to see low clouds being carried towards our windward sides by the trade winds. We can see high and middle level clouds over the ocean far to our west, southwest and to the south. Checking out this looping radar image we see scattered showers being carried along in the northeast to easterly trade wind flow.

Sunset Commentary:  A rather extensive band of showery clouds moved in over the windward sides last evening, which kept rainy weather in place into Thursday morning. The windward sides of both Maui and the Big Island still had showers falling early this afternoon. Each of the major islands had rainfall totals over an inch, with Kilohana on Kauai topping out with 2.10” during the last 24 hours…while the Puu Kukui gauge in west Maui picking up a very impressive 4.35”. This particular band of clouds has ended its beneficial rains now for the most part, although there are more patches upstream of the islands, which will bring periodic showers to these sides of the islands into Friday.

The computer models continue to suggest that we’ll see an area of cold air aloft, an upper level trough of low pressure move over the state later this weekend. There are variations in the exact placement of this trough, among other details, although it looks likely that we’ll see at least some increase in windward biased showers for a couple of days…probably around Sunday into next Monday. This time of year isn’t known for its wet weather, at least usually that is, so this has been a boon in terms of bringing moisture our way recently. We’ll have to wait and see about this possible increase later this weekend.

As for the trade winds, they are strong and gusty, especially in those locally windiest areas. These winds are strong enough now for the NWS office in Honolulu to expand the small craft wind advisories across all the major channels in the state…plus those windiest coastal waters too. This flow of air isn’t a shallow one, as even the summits on both Maui and the Big Island are gusty as well. A wind advisory is in force up there, and will likely remain in place through Friday. The winds may take a slight turn towards the softer side starting this weekend, although they won’t be skidding to a stop by any means…that’s for sure.

The surf remained up along our south and west facing leeward beaches today. A high surf advisory remains in effect across all of those beaches Thursday night. The waves may drop a little, as this first swell fades a little. A second south swell will bring the surf up again later tonight into Friday…with a gradual lowering as we push into the weekend. This swell is large enough that our local visitors, and even our own local residents, need to be careful when getting into the ocean, where these larger than normal waves are breaking. This is quite common during our summer season, as early winter storms in the southern hemisphere send us these south swell episodes.

Here in Kihei, Maui at 530pm HST Thursday evening, skies were clear to partly cloudy. As noted above, the trade winds are really breezy now, which will carry forward into Friday and the weekend. The abundant showers that we saw last night won't continue tonight, with fewer by quite a bit in most spots. Friday looks like another nice day, that is if you don't mind the wind blowing the trees around. There was a gust up over 50 mph early this evening down on the Big Island, with all the islands gusting up over 30 mph in places. I'm heading back upcountry to Kula now, after another long day of weather work here at the Pacific Disaster Center. I'll meet you back here early Friday morning with your next new weather narrative. I hope you have a great Thursday night until then! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting: Have you ever given much thought to what happens to those little bars of soap that you come across in hotel rooms? What happens when you open one of those neatly packaged bars and use it? Perhaps you don’t even finish it and leave it there and assume housekeeping will throw it away. According to Clean the World, hotels discard millions of pounds of soap and shampoo in the U.S.

These products often end up in already overflowing landfills and contaminate fragile groundwater systems. Clean the World is a non-profit organization that distributes recycled soap products, along with appropriate educational materials to impoverished communities and to domestic homeless shelters.

According to them, each year more than five million lives are lost to severe respiratory diseases with the majority of deaths being among children less than five years old. Studies have shown that simple hand washing substantially reduces the spread of these diseases. Unfortunately, the essential items for proper hand washing are unobtainable for millions of people worldwide.

They have developed a process to sanitize used hotel soap and leftover shampoo. They reform the soap into new bars and then send it to parts of the world that can use it. They have also partnered with a number of hotel chains to collect all the little bars of used soap.

Many hotels have also partnered with Clean the World as part of their CSR initiatives to ensure that soap is recycled effectively. In just two years of operation, the NGO has distributed more than 8 million bars of soap to children and families in the U.S and more than 40 countries including Haiti, Japan, Zimbabwe, Uganda, India, Honduras, Mexico and Albania.

Interesting2: If ancient gray whale populations migrated and fed the same as today's whales, what happened during the Ice Ages, when their major feeding grounds disappeared? UC Berkeley and Smithsonian paleontologists argue that gray whales utilized a range of food sources in the past, including herring and krill, in addition to the benthic organisms they consume today.

As a result, pre-whaling populations were two to four times greater than today's population of around 22,000. Gray whales survived many cycles of global cooling and warming over the past few million years, likely by exploiting a more varied diet than they do today, according to a new study by University of California, Berkeley, and Smithsonian Institution paleontologists.

The researchers, who analyzed California gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus) responses to climate change over the past 120,000 years, also found evidence to support the idea that the population of gray whales along the Pacific Coast before the arrival of humans was two to four times today's population, which stands at about 22,000.

The whale is considered a conservation success story because protections instituted as early as the 1930s have allowed populations to rebound from fewer than 1,000 individuals in the early 20th century, after less than 75 years of systematic whaling.

"There almost certainly were higher gray whale populations in the past," said evolutionary biologist David Lindberg, a UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology who coauthored the paper with his former student, Nicholas D. Pyenson, now curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. The paper appears on July 6 in the online, open-access journal PLoS ONE.

Lindberg and Pyenson suggest that higher populations in the past were possible because gray whales utilized a greater variety of food resources — resources that today's whales are only now beginning to exploit. According to Lindberg, gray whales were once thought to feed only by suctioning seafloor sediment and filtering out worms and amphipods — so-called benthic organisms.

But some whales are now eating herring and krill as well, just like their baleen whale relatives, which include the humpback and the blue. Some whales are even dropping out of the migratory rat race. One group hangs out year-round off Vancouver Island in Canada, where they chase herring and krill. "We propose that gray whales survived the disappearance of their primary feeding ground by employing generalist filter-feeding modes, similar to the resident gray whales found between northern Washington State and Vancouver Island," the scientists wrote in their paper.

"A combination of low population numbers and a species migrating between places where humans didn't bother them gave us the impression that gray whales have a stereotypical migratory and feeding behavior that may not be historically correct," Lindberg said. The new population numbers accord with a 2007 estimate that the California gray whale population was likely 76,000 to 120,000 before humans began hunting them.

That estimate, by Stephen Palumbi of Stanford University and his collaborators, was based on an analysis of gray whale genetic diversity. The numbers clash, however, with claims by some ecologists that populations of between 15,000 and 20,000 are likely the most that the Pacific Coast — specifically along the whales' 11,000 kilometer (6,900 mile) migratory route from Baja California to the Bering Sea — could support, today or in the past.

"Our data say that, if the higher estimates are right, gray whales would have made it through the Ice Ages in numbers sufficiently large to avoid bottlenecking," Pyenson said. "If gray whale populations were at the lower levels, they would only have squeaked through the ice ages with populations of hundreds or a few thousand. That would have left bottlenecking evidence in their DNA."

Bottlenecking is when populations drop so low that inbreeding becomes common, decreasing the genetic diversity in the species and making them less able to adapt to environmental change. The new assessment is good news for gray whales, which appear to have "a lot more evolutionary plasticity than anyone imagined," Lindberg said.

This could help them survive the climate change predicted within the next few centuries that is characterized by an expected sea level rise of several meters. "I suspect the gray whales will be among the winners in the great climate change experiment," Pyenson said.

Lindberg and Pyenson initiated the study several years ago in the face of conflicting and contentious estimates for past gray whale populations. They thought that an understanding of how gray whales adapted to climate change over the past 3 million years, the period called the Pleistocene, might provide insight into how they will adapt to climate change today.

Since gray whales arose — the oldest fossils date from 2.5 million years ago — Earth has gone through more than 40 major cycles of warming and cooling, each of which significantly affected the world's flora and fauna. During the last glacial cold spell, between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago, most of the large terrestrial mammals disappeared through a combination of climate change and human depredation, Lindberg noted.

The marine realm, however, experienced almost no extinctions and very few new originations during that same period. The California, or eastern, gray whale, one of two surviving populations of gray whale, can be traced back about 150,000-200,000 years. Pyenson and Lindberg looked closely at only the past 120,000 years, during which Earth transitioned from a warm period to a glacial period and then to today's warmer climate.

During the glaciated period, ocean water became locked up in land-based glaciers, drawing down the sea level by about 120 meters, or nearly 400 feet. That drop eliminated nearly 60 percent of the Bering Sea Platform, a shallow area that is part of the continental shelf and the major summer feeding area for today's gray whales.

Gray whales can engage in benthic feeding no deeper than about 250 feet, Pyenson said, and during the glacial period, waters offshore of the Bering platform would have been much deeper than that. "If gray whales were primarily feeding on the Bering Platform, it's hard to see how they could have avoided a population crash," Lindberg said.

By calculating the amount of food lost because of dropping sea levels, and combining this with estimates of the food needed to keep a whale alive, the two researchers calculated the impact of global cooling on gray whale populations and the populations that would have had to exist in order for the whales to survive.

They concluded that populations would have had to have alternative feeding modes sufficient to support a population of around 70,000 during warm periods so that population drops during glacial periods wouldn't be below 5,000-10,000 whales. Much lower numbers would have produced a genetic bottleneck obvious in the DNA of the whales, and such a signature has not yet been seen.

"We don't yet have the ability to look deep enough into the whale genome to see this type of bottleneck," Pyenson added, though genetic analysis that has been done shows no evidence of a bottleneck much shallower in time, just before humans targeted the mammals for whaling. The carrying capacity of the North Pacific could have been as high as 170,000, "assuming modern day values for benthic productivity, food density, and gray whale energetics," the authors concluded.

If gray whales also exploited non-benthic organisms, such as krill, the populations could have been even higher. If gray whales do respond well to the rising temperatures and sea levels predicted for the future, that may not be true for the birds and other marine mammals that feed in the Bering Sea, one of the most productive marine ecosystems during the summer.

"If this environment disappears in glacial maxima, we really need to rethink what we know about the ecological history of all the other organisms that make a living in the Bering Sea," Pyenson said. He and Lindberg urge other scientists to focus on the historical ecology of species to fully understand their complex interactions with a changing environment.