May 8-9 2008

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

Lihue, Kauai – 80
Honolulu, Oahu – 85
Kaneohe, Oahu – 80
Kahului, Maui – 84
Hilo, Hawaii – 79
Kailua-Kona, Hawaii – 83

Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level at 4 a.m. Thursday afternoon:

Honolulu, Oahu  – 83F
Lihue, Kauai – 75   

Precipitation Totals – The following numbers represent the largest precipitation totals (inches) during the last 24 hours on each of the major islands, as of Thursday afternoon: 

0.51  MOUNT WAIALEALE, KAUAI
0.73 SOUTH FORK KAUKONAHUA, OAHU
0.15 MOLOKAI
0.00 LANAI
0.00 KAHOOLAWE
1.15 PUU KUKUI, MAUI
0.92 GLENWOOD, BIG ISLAND

Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing high pressure centers far to the NE of the state. This large area of high pressure will keep moderately strong to fresh trade winds blowing across our islands Friday into Saturday…locally strong and gusty.

Satellite and Radar Images: To view the cloud conditions we have here in Hawaii, please use the following satellite links, starting off with the Infrared Satellite Image of the islands to see all the clouds around the state 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…out from the islands. 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 webcam 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 webcams 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 cloud conditions.

Aloha Paragraphs

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The art of flower lei making

The trade winds are blowing in the locally strong and gusty realms now. We’ve seen the trade winds increase a notch now, and will remain that way into the first half of the weekend. A small craft wind advisory is now active in all coastal and channel waters from the north shore of Kauai down through South Point, on the Big Island. These trades will slow down starting Sunday, becoming much lighter by the middle of next week. The latest models show them picking up again around next Thursday or Friday…then continuing through the rest of the week.

There will be the usual showers being carried in our direction on the fresh trade winds…slightly more numerous than normal. The windward areas as usual will find the most generous rainfall.  The leeward beaches will be generally quite dry, although a few showers could fall along the Kona slopes of the Big Island during the afternoon or early evening hours. As the winds are so strong now, a few stray showers may make it into the leeward areas at times on the smaller islands.

It’s Thursday evening as I begin writing this last section of today’s narrative. Just when we thought we were going to see the trade winds blowing through the remainder of spring, right on into the beginning of summer…we now see a stop sign up ahead! As I’ve been mentioning the last several days, the computer models want to have our winds getting much lighter for a day or two next week. Those models point out a rather deep trough of low pressure, with a cold front, approaching the Hawaiian Islands after the weekend. This storminess would push our trade wind producing high pressure ridge down closer to the state, and perhaps right down over us. This is the reason our winds will take a nose dive in strength…around next Tuesday and Wednesday.

~~~ If this happens as described, we would see our trade wind weather pattern giving way to a light wind convective weather pattern. We would see the haze levels around the state increasing, and if there was a drift of air coming up from the southeast, we could see thick volcanic haze, the infamous vog, settling in over many parts of the state. Often with this kind of weather pattern in force, we see clear, slightly cooler than normal mornings giving way to rather hot and muggy afternoons. At the same time we could see clouds stacking up over and around the mountains during the afternoons, with precipitation falling in the upcountry areas. Clouds typically evaporate again after dark, with the process beginning again the next day.

~~~ Thursday was another nice day here in the islands, although the trade winds were rushing around locally. The strongest winds that I saw during the aftrernoon hours, was the 44 mph gust here on Maui, at Maalaea Bay. They were still gusting to 42 mph at that windy Bay late in the afternoon. Kahoolawe saw gusts at the same time to 37 mph, while even normally light winded Lanai had 35 mph gusts. Other than all this "air in a hurry", skies were generally quite sunny during the day. As this looping satellite image shows, a strong stream of high cirrus clouds are remaining just to the south of Hawaii…riding along in the jet stream level winds. It wouldn’t take much of a nudge northward, to bring that high altitude cloudiness up over the Aloha state.

~~~ Friday will find the trade winds still on the rowdy side of the wind speed spectrum. Sunshine will be abundant, especially along the leeward sides of the islands. The windward sides will see a few showers falling, and there could be a couple of loud showers falling, particularly if you live under a tin roof! I’ll be back very early Friday morning with your next new weather narrative from paradise. I hope you have a great Thursday night until then! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting:  High gasoline prices could lead to a dramatic saving in US greenhouse-gas emissions. That’s the conclusion of economists in the US, who suggest high fuel prices are turning consumers off SUVs and onto smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles.  What’s more, car owners are predicted to cut back on driving in order to save money. Together, these changes in consumer behaviour could make an important dent in the US contribution to global warming, reducing annual carbon dioxide emissions by tens of millions of tons per year. The impact will be dramatic, says Chris Knittel, an economist at the University of California, Davis, who was involved in one of the studies. The changes are being driven by record fuel prices in the US, where, at the end of April, the average price of gasoline stood at $3.65 per gallon, 20 per cent more than in January and treble the price of a decade ago. Until recently, these increases did not seem to be having a consistent effect on the car market and fuel use. Though sales of SUVs in the US have been falling over the past few years, this decline has come on the back of years of rapid growth, and overall gasoline consumption has been increasing every year since 1991.

Interesting2: Wyoming Air Pollution Rivals Big Cities. There isn’t anything metropolitan about this tiny unincorporated town in southwest Wyoming, where a few single-family homes and a volunteer fire station stand against a skyline of snowcapped mountains. But Boulder, with a population of just 75 people, has one thing in common with major metropolitan areas: air pollution thick enough to pose health risks. "Used to be you could see horizon to horizon, crystal clear. Now you got this,” said Craig Jensen as he gestured to a pale blue sky that he says is not as deeply colored as it used to be. "Makes you wonder what it’s going to do to the grass, the trees and the birds.” The pollution, largely from the region’s booming natural gas industry, came in the form of ground-level ozone, which has exceeded healthy levels 11 times since January and caused Wyoming to issue its first ozone alerts. Now the ozone threatens to cost the industry and taxpayers millions of dollars to stay within federal clean-air laws. Sublette County is home to one of the largest natural gas reserves in North America, and it is dotted with hundreds of gas wells to supply the growing U.S. demand for cleaner-burning fuel. Thousands more wells are planned for the future.

Interesting3: Turn greenhouse gases to stone? Transform them into a treacle-like liquid deep under the seabed?  The ideas may sound like far-fetched schemes from an alchemist’s notebook but scientists are pursuing them as many countries prepare to bury captured greenhouse gases in coming years as part of the fight against global warming. Analysts say the search for a suitable technology could become a $150 billion-plus market. But a big worry is that gases may leak from badly chosen underground sites, perhaps jolted open by an earthquake.  Such leaks could be deadly and would stoke climate change. Part of the answer could be to petrify or liquefy gases like carbon dioxide — emitted for example from power plants and factories run on coal, oil or natural gas — if technical hurdles can be overcome and costs are not too high. "If you can convert (the gases) to stone, and it’s environmentally benign and permanent, then that’s better," said Juerg Matter, a German scientist at ColumbiaUniversity in New York who is working on a project in Iceland to turn carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, to rock. In theory, carbon dioxide reacts with porous basalt and turns into a mineral, but no one knows how long that takes. Matter and U.S., French and Icelandic experts plan to inject 50,000 tonnes of the gas into basalt in a test starting in 2009.


Interesting4: Remains of meals that included seaweed are helping confirm the date of a settlement in southern Chile that may offer the earliest evidence of humans in the Americas. Researchers date the seaweed found at Monte Verde to more than 14,000 years ago, 1,000 years earlier than the well-studied Clovis culture. And the report comes just a month after other scientists announced they had found coprolites — fossilized human feces — dating to about 14,000 years ago in a cave in Oregon. Taken together, the finds move back evidence of people in the Americas by a millennium or more, with settlements in northern and southern coastal areas. The prevailing theory has been that people followed herds of migrating animals across an ancient land bridge between Siberia and Alaska, and then moved southward along the West coast. Proof has been hard to come by, however. The sea was about 200 feet lower at the time and as it rose it would have inundated the remains of coastal settlements. A team led by anthropologist Tom Dillehay of Vanderbilt University reports on the new seaweed study from Monte Verde, Chile, in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.