Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs / July 24-25, 2008

Aloha Paragraphs



Great breaking wave shot!
Photo Credit: Flickr.com

Trade wind producing high pressure systems to the north of the islands, will keep our winds rather gusty into Friday…softening a little going into the weekend. Our trade winds will come down a notch or two in strength over the next couple of days, bringing them in line with what could be considered normal for this mid-summer period. We continue to see small craft wind advisory flags waving over the windiest coastal and channel waters in the southern part of the island chain. These winds are famous for bringing their cooling and refreshing relief from the July tropical heat.

These breezy trade winds will continue to carry occasional passing showers to our windward sides. These showers will arrive in an off and on manner through the rest of this week into next week. The night and early morning hours will be the favored times for these trade wind showers. The leeward areas will see less cloudiness and showers, and more sunshine and dry weather continuing. There’s some chance that we might see an increase in showers late next week…as an old tropical system (Genevieve), now in the eastern Pacific, gets carried in our direction on the trades.

~~~  It’s early Thursday evening here in Kihei, Maui, as I begin updating this last section of today’s narrative. We now find ourselves in the beginning of what looks to be a prolonged period of trade winds. The winds will vary a bit in strength from day to day, but in general we’re looking for moderately strong trade winds continuing well into the future.  Thursday turned out to be a lovely day, with a ton of sunshine beaming down, and considerably less cloudiness than we’ve seen over the last several days. The atmosphere has dried out right on schedule too, keeping showers limited for the most part to a couple of windward sections. The trade winds remained active, and still on the gusty side of the wind spectrum. Looking at the strongest gusts late Thursday afternoon, the island of Lanai, and Maalaea Bay here on Maui, showed 36 and 39 mph. Friday looks like it will be another nice summer day, which will lead right on into a pleasant weekend. I’ll be back very early Friday morning with your next new weather narrative from paradise. Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting: The world’s wetlands, threatened by development, dehydration and climate change, could release a planet-warming "carbon bomb" if they are destroyed, ecological scientists said recently. Wetlands contain 771 billion tons of greenhouse gases, one-fifth of all the carbon on Earth and about the same amount of carbon as is now in the atmosphere, the scientists said before an international conference linking wetlands and global warming. If all the wetlands on the planet released the carbon they hold, it would contribute powerfully to the climate-warming greenhouse effect, said Paulo Teixeira, coordinator of the Pantanal Regional Environment Program in Brazil.  "We could call it the carbon bomb," Teixeira said by telephone from Cuiaba, Brazil, site of the conference.

"It’s a very tricky situation."  Some 700 scientists from 28 nations are meeting this week at the INTECOL International Wetlands Conference at the edge of Brazil‘s vast Pantanal wetland to look for ways to protect these endangered areas. Wetlands are not just swamps: they also include marshes, peat bogs, river deltas, mangroves, tundra, lagoons and river flood plains. Together they account for 6 percent of Earth’s land surface and store 20 percent of its carbon. They also produce 25 percent of the world’s food, purify water, recharge aquifers and act as buffers against violent coastal storms. Historically, wetlands have been regarded as an impediment to civilization. About 60 percent of wetlands worldwide have been destroyed in the past century, mostly due to draining for agriculture. Pollution, dams, canals, groundwater pumping, urban development and peat extraction add to the destruction.

Interesting2:

A young whale pokes its melon-shaped head into the cool morning air near this remote island, a sign its herd is thriving despite mounting threats in Russia’s melting Arctic. Cameras and microphones capture the whale’s every move as scientists use the species only shore-side breeding ground to see how they are coping as fleets of oil tankers replace melting ice in their traditional feeding grounds. "Belugas are a bellwether species… what happens to them reflects the effects of pollution and global warming on the whole ecosystem," said Vsevolod Belkovich, a professor at the RussianAcademy of Science who is leading the study. Scientists have recorded a small drop in the whale population that they attribute in part to human activity in Arctic regions.

"As global warming continues, the threats are going to grow dramatically," Belkovich said. Since monitoring began scores of whales have traveled hundreds of miles (kilometers) each year to this White Sea sandbank to mate, frolic and train their young. Distinctive markings on the whales’ backs allow the researchers to track the population from year to year, monitoring their health, longevity and interactions with rival herds. "It’s the only place in the world they come so close to the shore," said Vladimir Baranov, a senior researcher with Moscow’s Institute of Oceanology, who films the Belugas close up underwater in their natural setting.

Interesting3: Older people are known to be lousy sleepers, but a new study suggests it might all be in their heads, at least for many of them. Medications, poor health, bad bedtime habits (such as watching a movie or drinking coffee or booze), circadian rhythms, and too much or too little in their personal "sleep bank" have all taken the blame for seniors’ common complaints of insomnia. Elizabeth Klerman of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Harvard Medical School set out to clear it up once and for all with a controlled study of 18 subjects ages 60 to 76 and 35 younger subjects, ages 18 to 32, all healthy and not on medication that might affect sleep.

Even people who had crossed more than one time zone in the past 3 months were disqualified, as well as those who had worked night or rotating shifts in the past three years. After monitoring their sleep at home, the subjects were regularly instructed to lie quietly with their eyes closed and to try to sleep, for as much as 16 hours daily for several days in a row. They had all the time in the world. The bottom line was that the seniors simply needed less sleep — about 1.5 hours less. he results are detailed online in the July 24 issue of the journal Current Biology. Younger subjects slept for an average of 9 hours compared to 7.5 for older people, said Klerman and her colleague Derk-Jan Dijk of the Surrey Sleep Research Centre in England.

Interesting4:

Seagrass meadows, which are vital for the survival of much marine life and a source of household materials in Europe and Africa, face a mounting threat from global warming. The report, from the Swiss-based International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), said the submerged meadows — many around the Mediterranean — could be saved through concerted action by governments and scientists. "Seagrass habitats are already declining due to increasing water temperatures, algae (seaweed) growth and light reduction, which are all effects of global change," said IUCN specialist Mats Bjork, one of the authors of the report.

The report said the grass — flowering plants found in shallow waters around the globe — provides food and shelter for prawn and fish populations and is used traditionally as mattress filling, roof covering and for medicines. If much of it were to disappear, a wide range of species — including dugongs, sea turtles, sea urchins and seabirds who feed on it — would also come under increased threat, according to the report. The report said some of the healthiest seagrass areas known to exist today were off the North African coast of Libya and Tunisia in areas where there had been little industrial or tourism development. Carl Gustaf Lundin, head of IUCN’s Global Marine Programme, said the meadows could be saved by making seagrass more resilient to climbing temperatures through mixing genetically more diverse populations.