Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs

  Beautiful Island Orchids
Photo Credit: Flickr.com

The trade winds will continue blowing across the tropical latitudes of Hawaii, bringing their cooling and refreshing relief from the early summer heat. Most areas around the state will find moderately strong trade winds blowing. The small craft wind advisory, in those windiest areas around Maui and the Big Island, remains active Monday. There doesn’t appear to be any end in sight for this extended period of trades, which is normal for the summer season. Winds will be locally very gusty, topping the 40 mph mark at times.

There have been more than the normal amount of showers here in the Aloha state the last couple of days. The bulk of those passing showers have arrived along the windward sides, where the largest precipitation totals have occurred. We’re expected a more or less normal amount of incoming showers this week, or perhaps slightly less than that. There’s a chance that later in the week, towards Friday into the weekend, we might see another increase…but that’s still too far out into the future for much certainty at this point.

~~~ It’s early Monday evening here in Kihei, Maui, as I begin writing this last section of today’s narrative. As this satellite image shows, we have some high clouds situated to the east and south of the islands. Some of this high cloudiness, which shows up in the satellite picture as whiter and brighter clouds, may move northward into the island chain overnight or Tuesday. Those types of clouds can provide great sunrise and sunset colors! Monday was characterized by windy trade wind weather, with little in the way of showers anywhere. At the height of the days winds, there was one gust that went all the way up the wind scale to 42 mph at Maalaea Bay, Maui. As a matter of fact, late this afternoon, the winds were gusting to 35 mph at Kahului, and still at 42 mph at Maalaea Bay. If you liked the weather here in Hawaii today, you will like it again Tuesday…as I see very little change in store. The one thing though, may be the intrusion of those high clouds to our south, which could end up dimming and filtering our famous Hawaiian sunshine. I’ll be back very early Tuesday morning with your next new weather narrative from paradise, I hope you have a great Monday night until then! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting: Information gleaned from a Greenland ice core by an international science team shows that two huge Northern Hemisphere temperature spikes prior to the close of the last ice age some 11,500 years ago were tied to fundamental shifts in atmospheric circulation. The ice core showed the Northern Hemisphere briefly emerged from the last ice age some 14,700 years ago with a 22-degree-Fahrenheit spike in just 50 years, then plunged back into icy conditions before abruptly warming again about 11,700 years ago. Startlingly, the Greenland ice core evidence showed that a massive "reorganization" of atmospheric circulation in the Northern Hemisphere coincided with each temperature spurt, with each reorganization taking just one or two years, said the study authors. 

The new findings are expected to help scientists improve existing computer models for predicting future climate change as increasing anthropogenic greenhouse gases in the atmosphere drive up Earth’s temperatures globally. The team used changes in dust levels and stable water isotopes in the annual ice layers of the two-mile-long Greenland ice core, which was hauled from the massive ice sheet between 1998 to 2004, to chart past temperature and precipitation swings. Their paper was published in the June 19 issue of Science Express, the online version of Science.

Interesting2: It’s a battle that’s been raging in this country for more than 15 years, with skirmishes fought in town council rooms, the House of Commons, the Supreme Court of Canada and on the letters pages of this newspaper. But the use of pesticides for purely esthetic purposes — such as killing dandelions — has likely never been a hotter topic than it is today.  The push for a cosmetic pesticide ban in Calgary comes at a time when citizens have started questioning the safety of the food they eat, the toys they buy and the chemicals they’re exposed to. That public awareness has seen the movement for a pesticide ban pick up speed in Calgary, says Robin McLeod, spokeswoman for the Coalition for a Healthy Calgary. A Canadian Cancer Society survey released in May found 87 per cent of Albertans support community bylaws banning the cosmetic use of pesticides.

"Environmental concerns are becoming a bigger issue for Canadians as a whole," McLeod says. If passed, Calgary would be the first major municipality west of Ontario to implement a pesticide ban. In February, three aldermen brought forward a proposal for Calgary to phase out the use of pesticides — including herbicides, insecticides and fungicides — for cosmetic purposes by the end of 2010. The proposal called for city crews to stop using the chemicals by December 2009, with the ban to include private property by December 2010. After two hours of debate, the issue was referred to an environmental advisory board to study and come back with recommendations.

Interesting3: California’s air board, for years an obscure state agency, will take center stage this week when it unveils a blueprint for the nation’s most aggressive fight against global warming, a newspaper report said on Sunday.  The plan is expected to affect every resident, industry and government agency in the state in the coming decade, the San Francisco Chronicle said. The far-reaching plan, which comes 18 months after Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed landmark legislation to curb greenhouse emissions by one-third by 2020, is likely to encourage consumers to use energy-efficient light bulbs and replace gas-guzzling cars with fuel-sipping hybrids.  The plan could require industry to reduce pollution or pay fees based on the amount of carbon they release, according to the report.

Mary Nichols, chairwoman of the California Air Resources Board, said the draft of the "scoping plan," which the agency’s staff will present next Thursday to the 11-member board, will be a work in progress until the final version is adopted by the end of the year. "We’ve been clear up until now that the draft plan will lay out our background information on where the state’s emissions come from, how much they need to be reduced, and lay out a strategy on how to address them sector by sector," Nichols said. About 60 percent of the needed reductions can be obtained by implementing existing regulations or new rules that are in the regulatory pipeline, Nichols said.

Interesting4: The climate of early Earth was no day at the beach, with stinging acid rains and an intensely warm surface, a new study suggests. These harsh conditions could explain why geologists today have found no rocks more than 4 billion years old: They were all weathered away. The fate of all those rocks from the first 500 million years after Earth formed has been a longstanding question in geology. Scientists have floated various explanations for the missing rocks, including destruction by barrages of meteorites and the possibility that the early Earth was a sea of red-hot magma in which no rocks could form. The analysis in the new study suggests a different scenario. Geologists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison examined zircon crystals, the oldest known materials on Earth, to shed light on the fate of rocks from the early Earth. Zircons, which are smaller than a speck of sand, can offer a window back in time to about 4.4 billion years ago, when the Earth was a mere 150 million years old because they are extremely resistant to chemical changes.

The research team analyzed the ratios of different isotopes of lithium (which have different atomic weights and number of neutrons per atom) in zircons from the JackHills in Western Australia. They compared the lithium fingerprints of those zircons to those from continental crust and rocks similar to those found in Earth’s mantle, the molten layer sandwiched between the crust and core. The results of the analysis, detailed in a recent online issue of the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, provide evidence that the young Earth already had the beginnings of continents, relatively cool temperatures and liquid water by the time the Australian zircons formed.

Interesting5: Exactly 20 years after warning America about global warming, a top NASA scientist said the situation has gotten so bad that the world’s only hope is drastic action. James Hansen told Congress on Monday that the world has long passed the "dangerous level" for greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and needs to get back to 1988 levels. He said Earth’s atmosphere can only stay this loaded with man-made carbon dioxide for a couple more decades without changes such as mass extinction, ecosystem collapse and dramatic sea level rises. "We’re toast if we don’t get on a very different path," Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute of Space Sciences who is sometimes called the godfather of global warming science, told The Associated Press. "This is the last chance." Hansen brought global warming home to the public in June 1988 during a Washington heat wave, telling a Senate hearing that global warming was already here. To mark the anniversary, he testified before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming where he was called a prophet, and addressed a luncheon at the National Press Club where he was called a hero by former Sen. Tim Wirth, D-Colo., who headed the 1988 hearing.

To cut emissions, Hansen said coal-fired power plants that don’t capture carbon dioxide emissions shouldn’t be used in the United States after 2025, and should be eliminated in the rest of the world by 2030. That carbon capture technology is still being developed and not yet cost efficient for power plants. Burning fossil fuels like coal is the chief cause of man-made greenhouse gases. Hansen said the Earth’s atmosphere has got to get back to a level of 350 parts of carbon dioxide per million. Last month, it was 10 percent higher: 386.7 parts per million. Hansen said he’ll testify on behalf of British protesters against new coal-fired power plants. Protesters have chained themselves to gates and equipment at sites of several proposed coal plants in England. "The thing that I think is most important is to block coal-fired power plants," Hansen told the luncheon. "I’m not yet at the point of chaining myself but we somehow have to draw attention to this.