Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs

  Barking Sands, Kauai
Photo Credit: Flickr.com

As is often the case during the month of June, there is no end in sight to the trade winds here in Hawaii. Most areas around the state will find moderately strong trade winds blowing Wednesday and Thursday. The small craft wind advisory, in those windiest areas around Maui and the Big Island, remains active…although may be dropped soon. There may be some weakening of our local winds Thursday into the weekend, although they will continue to blow right into next week…picking up in strength again after the weekend.

Those trade winds will carry clouds in our direction, although there’s nothing unusual about that this time of year. The majority of whatever passing showers that arrive, will end up along the windward sides. We’re expecting somewhat less that the normal amount of incoming showers Wednesday. There’s a good chance that Thursday and Friday, and perhaps into the weekend…may be a bit more productive in terms of incoming showers. This increase will be most pronounced along the windward sides, although a few lucky leeard spots might see a few showers too.

~~~  As this looping satellite image shows, we’re in between periods of high cirrus clouds. The bright white clouds, moving along generally from left to right, are the icy cirrus clouds. Looking further to the west (to the left) of the islands, we see what may be our next batch of high cloudiness approaching. It will likely take another day or two before they arrive. We like these clouds, as they don’t bring rain, they’re too high up in the atmosphere for that…and they provide often vividly colorful sunrise and sunset colors.

~~~ Our local weather is gliding along nicely, providing good weather conditions for us now. Just about all outdoor activities that I can think of, including tennis, golf, beaching, hiking, badminton, among others, will find the weather cooperating. The morning hours as usual will have the least wind, while the afternoons will find windier conditions. Personally, I enjoy the mornings for my beach outings, as the wind makes the ocean choppy later in the days. Air temperatures will be warm to very warm during the days, and seasonably warm at night…cooler of course in the upcountry areas.

~~~ It’s early Wednesday evening here in Kihei, Maui, as I begin writing this last paragraph of today’s narrative. As was the case Tuesday at this same time, glancing out the window, there’s hardly a cloud in the sky in any direction. Craning my neck to see all the way over the windward side, I don’t see even one cloud out in the direction…which is unusual with the trade winds blowing. Those blue skies don’t give up much rain obviously, so that most rain gauges around the state have remained dry as a bone. I’m about ready to take the drive upcountry, to Kula, where it is even nearly cloud free too…which is even more unusual. The winds remain up in strength today, with the strongest gust at just past 5pm, tied at 32 mph at both the Kahului airport, and Maalaea Bay, both of course here on Maui. I expect the favorably inclined weather conditions to remain in place through the night, with that possible increase in showers along the windward sides sliding into place at some point Thurdsay. I’ll be back very early Thursday to discuss that, and everything else about the weather here in the Hawaiian Islands then. I hope you have a great Wednesday night wherever you happen to be spending it! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting:

A major review by University of Adelaide researchers shows that the world is losing the battle over tropical habitat loss with potentially disastrous implications for biodiversity and human well-being. Published online today in the Ecological Society of America’s journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, the review concludes we are "on a trajectory towards disaster" and calls for an immediate global, multi-pronged conservation approach to avert the worst outcomes. Lead author Associate Professor Corey Bradshaw, from the University of Adelaide‘s School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, says tropical forests support more than 60% of all known species. But up to 15 million hectares of tropical rainforest are being lost every year and species are being lost at a rate of up to 10,000 times higher than would happen randomly without humans present. "This is not just a tragedy for tropical biodiversity, this is a crisis that will directly affect human livelihoods," says Associate Professor Bradshaw.

"This is not just about losing tiny species found at the base of big trees in a rain forest few people will ever see, this is about a complete change in ecosystem services that directly benefit human life. "The majority of the world’s population live in the tropics and what is at stake is the survival of species that pollinate most of the world’s food crops, purify our water systems, attenuate severe flood risk, sequester carbon (taking carbon dioxide out of the air) and modify climate." Associate Professor Bradshaw says recent technical debate about likely extinction rates in the tropics could be used by governments to justify destructive policies. "We must not accept belief that all is well in the tropics, or that the situation will improve with economic development, nor use this as an excuse for inaction on the vexing conservation challenges of this century," he says. "We need to start valuing forests for all the services they provide, and richer nations should be investing in the maintenance of tropical habitats."

Interesting2:

Major technological progress needed to make renewable energy affordable says a study by the RAND corporation.  Dramatic progress in renewable energy technology is needed if the United States desires to produce 25 percent of its electricity and motor vehicle fuel from renewable sources by 2025 without significantly increasing consumer costs, according to a RAND Corporation study issued today.  Produced by the RAND Environment, Energy and Economic Development program, the study provides a "snapshot" of the nation’s potential energy expenditures if a requirement was imposed that 25 percent of electricity and motor vehicle fuels used in the United States by 2025 would come from renewable resources (a goal activists have described as "25 x ’25"). The study finds that biomass resources and wind power have the greatest potential to contribute toward reaching the 25 x ’25 goal.

The study replaces a report withdrawn by RAND in 2006 because of errors RAND identified in the computer model and numerical assumptions on which the findings were based. The new report finds that meeting the 25 x ’25 goals would be more challenging than outlined in the earlier version of the report. RAND is a nonprofit research organization. The Energy Future Coalition, a nonprofit environmental organization, asked RAND to assess the economic and other impacts of meeting the 25 x ’25 goal. The RAND study considered technological and economic factors that would affect the costs of renewable energy as well as non-renewable fossil fuels.

Interesting3:

The world’s poorest nations are unable to manage the mountains of toxic waste flowing in for disposal from rich countries because of a lack of resources and political will, officials said Wednesday. Katharina Kummer Peiry, the executive secretary of a UN convention on hazardous waste disposal, said the dumping of everything from hazardous chemicals to electronic waste from televisions and computers in poor countries is a growing problem. She blamed it mostly on the inability of poor nations to finance better enforcement and monitoring of waste coming into their ports. "The problem lies in the lack of interest and lack of resources on the issue at all levels," Peiry said.

The warning comes as delegates from as many as 170 countries meet on the Indonesian island of Bali to discuss how they can strengthen the U.N.-administered Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal, adopted in 1989. The meeting ends Friday. The extent of the problem was illustrated in 2006, when hundreds of tons of toxic waste were dumped around Ivory Coast‘s main city of Abidjan, killing at least 10 people and sickening tens of thousands more. The waste came from a tanker chartered by the Dutch commodities trading company Trafigura Beheer BV, which turned to Africa after disposal costs in Amsterdam were deemed too expensive.

Interesting4: The argument that increasing whale populations are behind declining fish stocks is completely without scientific foundation, leading researchers and conservation organizations said today as the International Whaling Commission opened its 60th meeting in Santiago, Chile.  The Humane Society International, WWF and the Lenfest Ocean Program today presented three new reports debunking the science behind the ”˜whales-eat-fish’ claims emanating from whaling nations Japan, Norway and Iceland. The argument has been used to bolster support for whaling, particularly from developing nations.

“It is not the whales, it is over-fishing and excess fishing capacity that are responsible for diminishing supplies of fish in developing countries,” said fisheries biologist Dr. Daniel Pauly, director of the University of British Columbia Fisheries Centre. “Making whales into scapegoats serves only to benefit wealthy whaling nations while harming developing nations by distracting any debate on the real causes of the declines of their fisheries.” Who’s eating all the fish? The food security rationale for culling cetaceans, the report co-authored by Dr Pauly for the Humane Society International contrasts “the widely different impacts of fisheries and marine mammals” with fisheries targeting larger fish where available and marine mammals consuming mainly smaller fish and organisms.

Interesting5: Coiled up in a tornado is as much energy as an entire power plant. So a Canadian engineer has a plans to spin up his own twister and extract energy from its tethered tail. It all depends on heating the air near the surface so that it is much warmer than the air above. "You can generate energy whenever you have a temperature gradient," said Louis Michaud. "The source of the energy here is the natural movement of warm and cold air currents." These so-called convective air currents are only useful if they can be channeled in some way. That is why Michaud proposes using a tornado as a kind of drinking straw between the warm ground below and the cold sky above. Wind turbines placed at the bottom could generate electricity from the sucked-up air. Tornadoes and hurricanes form when sun-heated air near the surface rises and displaces cooler air above.

As outside air rushes in to replace the rising air, the whole mass begins to rotate. Michaud got the notion of a man-made tornado — what he calls the Atmospheric Vortex Engine (AVE) — while working as an engineer on gas turbines. "When I looked further into it, I didn’t run into anything that was impossible," Michaud told LiveScience. The AVE structure is a 200-meter-wide arena with 100-meter-high walls. Warm humid air enters at the sides, directed to flow in a circular fashion. As the air whirls around at speeds up to 200 mph, a vacuum forms in the center, which holds the vortex together as it extends several miles into the sky. The concept is similar to a solar chimney with the swirling walls of the vortex replacing the brick walls of the tower. But the AVE can reach much higher into the sky where the air is colder.