Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs

Out along the Hana, Maui coastline
Photo Credit: flickr.com

There’s no end in sight for the trade winds, although they will be slightly lighter now through Thursday into Friday. Wind speeds will remain in the light to moderately strong range. High pressure will remain anchored in the area north through northeast of Hawaii, which will be the source of our long lasting trade wind weather pattern. As the weekend rolls around, the trade winds are expected to boost up into the moderately strong category…continuing into next week.

A few showers will fall along the windward sides, although generally quite light precipitation totals are expected through Friday. The leeward sides will find dry weather, with the only exception being Kona slopes, where the usual afternoon cloudiness may drop a couple of light showers. As the trade winds increase a notch this weekend, we will likely see some increase in showers right after the weekend, although once again…the bias will remain focused along the windward sides.

~~~  The calender may tell us that we’re still in the spring season, although the weather here in the islands…sure has the look and feel of summer now! The days are getting warmer and warmer, which in turn is prompting the surrounding ocean to gain warmth as well. These two, working in tandem, make it seem like we should have already reached the summer solstice, which is of course June 21st or so. It won’t be long before we see our maximum temperatures, at those warmest sea level locations, topping out at 90F degrees…as we’re just short of that now.

~~~ The trade winds, another sign of summer weather conditions, have faltered several times this spring. This has lead to light and variable wind episodes, more than I remember as being normal. We have probably put the last light winded event behind us now, with a pretty solid period of steady trade winds, like through most of the summer into the early autumn…coming up. As we move deeper into spring, and then into summer, the trade winds will be hard to stop.

~~~ Wednesday was another fine day, in a long string of pleasant late spring days. The day started off, at least here on Maui, with excellent air visibilities. As I was driving down the Haleakala Highway, from Kula to Kahului, early this morning…the West Maui Mountains were totally clear. The valleys and ridges had exceptional clarity, for a change! My Kona weather reporter this morning told me that the voggy weather is sticking like glue to that part of the Big Island. The trade winds held up, despite their getting a little lighter, making for a great day for our local beaches. I don’t see any weather problems in our immediate future, with the next wetter period perhaps arriving late this coming weekend or by early next week. This turn will occur as the clouds from an cold front arrives over the islands from the north and northeast, at about the same time an upper level trough of low pressure moves up over us from the south. The hope is that these two weather features may team up to bring us some much needed precipitation. I’ll have more information about that soon, along with some news about the eastern Pacific’s first tropical cyclone of the 2008 hurricane season. As always, I’ll be back very early Thursday morning with your next new weather narrative from paradise. I hope you have a great Wednesday night until then! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting: Wind energy can supply 20 percent of U.S. electricity needs by 2030 at a "modest" cost difference, a new U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) report says. The analysis predicts that the 20 percent wind scenario would cost about 2 percent more than sticking with the current energy mix, which relies more heavily on traditional fossil fuels.  "The 20 percent wind scenario entails higher initial capital costs (to install wind capacity and associated transmission infrastructure) in many areas, yet offers lower ongoing energy costs than conventional power plants for operations, maintenance, and fuel," said the report, which was written in conjunction with industry and environmental analysts. Under the scenario, 500,000 new jobs would be created. To reach their goal by 2030, the department said wind energy installation would need to triple from the current rate of 5.2 gigawatts (GW) added in 2007 to more than 16 GW per year by 2018, with that pace continuing through 2030. The total wind energy growth, 290 GW, would displace the projected use of coal for power generation by 18 percent and the use of natural gas by about 50 percent

Interesting2: Warmer temperatures brought on by climate change could trim output of some U.S. crops like corn in coming decades, but increase yields from other crops like soybeans, government scientists said on Tuesday. U.S. corn output dips and rises from year-to-year but has risen overall as farmers use new seeds and fertilizers to maximize growth. But output of the corn crops grown today could fall as much as much as 5 percent in coming decades as expected higher temperatures brought on by greenhouse gas emissions cause droughts and weaken plants, scientists said in a U.S. Department of Agriculture report released on Tuesday. The report synthesized peer-reviewed studies on how climate change would affect agriculture, most of which assumed U.S. temperatures would rise about 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) over the next 30 to 50 years, as indicated by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report last year.

Interesting3: Getting away from it all doesn’t have to mean leaving your frosty cold-ones behind. These SunDanzer energy efficient DC refrigerators can keep your vitals cold while maintaining the off-the-grid status of your mountaintop yoga studio. The fridge will cost somewhere around $1,000 with ancillary electrical stuff and solar array estimated costing another $900 to $1,000.

Interesting4: Much of the seafloor long thought to be barren is instead teeming with microbes, researchers said today.  Scientists now have found "thousands of times more bacteria on the seafloor than in the water above," according to a statement. The findings were made at two sites, suggesting that rich microbial life extends across the ocean floor, said University of Southern California geomicrobiologist Katrina J. Edwards.  These results, along with a separate discovery announced last week of life a mile below the seafloor, have scientists wondering if life on Earth began along shorelines or perhaps originated in the planet’s marine belly.  They plan to dig deeper into the question soon. Using genetic analysis, Edwards and colleagues found higher microbial diversity on common, basalt rocks compared with other marine locations, such as those found at hydrothermal vents. The diversity on the seafloor rocks was as rich as that in common farm soil. "We now know that there are many more such microbes than anyone had guessed," said David L. Garrison, director of the National Science Foundation’s biological oceanography program. The findings are detailed in the May 29 issue of the journal Nature. The big question now is where all these newfound bacteria get the energy they need to survive.