Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs

The trade winds will continue to blow across the Hawaiian Islands. These winds remain strong enough to keep small craft wind advisories active in most marine zones statewide. These late winter trade winds are expected to remain active through the next week. The latest weather maps show an unusually strong high pressure system establishing itself to the north and northeast Tuesday into Wednesday. This in turn will keep the trade winds strong and gusty through Friday…gradually tapering off a little by this coming weekend.  
 
There will be a combination of lower and high level clouds, with passing showers carried our way by the trade winds. An upper level trough of low pressure remains in place close to Hawaii Monday. This will help to destabilize the atmosphere, enough to enhance the incoming showers along the windward sides in places. The cold air aloft, associated with this trough aloft, may add a few locally heavy showers around Maui and the Big Island…perhaps even a thunderstorm or two! As the trade winds are quite strong, a few showers may get carried over into the leeward sections here and there. 

It’s Monday as I begin writing this last paragraph of today’s narrative. Rock steady trade winds will continue to be the name of the game in the Hawaiian Islands now. All forecasting tools point towards more of the same, which may very well increase another notch during the second half of this new work week. Meanwhile, as pointed out in the paragraph above, we’re finally back into a more normal precipitation regime now. There were actually a couple of the wetter spots around the state, that pushed up into the 1.00"+ range during the last 24 hours. Monday will see more of these off and on passing showers, along with some possible heavy showers over the leeward slopes during the afternoon hours as well. ~~~  Satellite imagery shows that there are clouds being carried our way on the trade winds, which are blowing at the lower levels of the atmosphere. There are certainly no lack of clouds surrounding the islands in pretty much all directions. Here’s a looping radar image, which show a fair amount of showers being carried along in the gusty trade winds, and stacking up over the islands too. ~~~ Monday turned out to be a cloudy day, at least by the afternoon hours. Late in the day here on Maui, there were several thunderstorms that formed, with lightning and thunder noted. It appears that some areas on the Big Island, had thunder as well. There were locally generous rains that fell in the vicinity of these cumuluonimbus clouds. ~~~ I have to leave Kihei early today, as I have a tax appointment in Kahului, gulp! I’d better get out on the road now, as quite often there are traffic problems this time of day. I hope you have a great Monday night wherever you happen to be spending it! I’ll be back very early Tuesday morning with your next new weather narrative. Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting2: “We can once again actually ”˜sail’ with cargo ships, thus opening a new chapter in the history of commercial shipping”. Thus is the verdict from MV Beluga Skysails captain Lutz Heldt upon completion of the vessel’s 12,000 mile round trip maiden voyage. The crew and vessel were at sea for nearly two months, giving the “skysail” concept ample opportunity for testing and tweaking. The journey took the ship from Germany to Venezuela, the United States, and then to Norway, arriving on March 13. We’ve been keeping an eye on the ship’s progress here at Triple Pundit, from initial concept, sea trials, and now the round-trip completion of her first commercial voyage using the hybrid auxiliary power kite system installed on the Beluga Skysails. Deployment of the 160—square-meter towing kite offset up to 20% of the engine’s power (and carbon emissions), saving an initial $1000 per day in fuel costs.