Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs / July 25-26, 2008

Aloha Paragraphs



Catching the trade winds in those colorful sails
Photo Credit: flickr.com

High pressure centers to the north and northeast of Hawaii, will keep our trade winds blowing well into the future. These breezes will remain blowing in the more or less moderately strong realms…although still locally gusty. The small craft wind advisory will stay alive over the windiest coastal and channel waters in the southern part of the island chain. The computer models show no end in sight for these cooling and refreshing winds, keeping them active through the rest of July…right on into the deep summer month of August.

As is common during a trade wind weather pattern, we’ll see a few passing showers falling along the windward sides. These showers will arrive in an off and on fashion through the weekend into next week. The leeward areas will see less cloudiness and showers, and more sunshine and dry weather continuing. There’s a decent chance that we might see an increase in showers at the beginning of the new week, from the remnant moisture brought our way by former eastern Pacific tropical system Fausto. Additionally, there remains the chance that late next week, another old tropical system (the current hurricane Genevieve), now in the eastern Pacific, will bring a second increase in tropical showers…as it gets carried in our direction on the trades.

~~~ The eastern Pacific Ocean has been quite busy thus far into the 2008 hurricane season. We’ve seen four hurricanes already, which is about two weeks ahead of the average date for four of them to have occurred…which is August 10th. At this point, the eastern Pacific has already had more hurricanes than all of the 2007 hurricane season combined. Unless there’s a big slow down, we’ll see more hurricanes spinning up over there. Here in the central Pacific, we’ve seen no tropical cyclone activity yet, although former hurricane Elida (the third eastern Pacific hurricane), crossed over into our area as a tropical disturbance…prompting gusty trade winds and generous showers recently, as it passed just south of our islands. Here’s a tracking map showing hurricane Genevieve in relation to the Hawaiian Islands. This hurricane will be running over a cooler sea surface soon, which will take some of the steam out of its sails…stepping it down through the tropical storm, tropical depression stages, into a much weaker tropical disturbance before it moves into our central Pacific. Here’s a looping satellite image of that wild lady, spinning the waters far to our east.

~~~ It’s early Friday evening here in Kihei, Maui, as I start updating this last paragraph of today’s narrative. As



















expected, our weather has taken a turn fully back into the late July normal realms. That means gusty trade winds, lots of sunshine, just a few windward biased showers…along with warm air and ocean! This weekend looks like a great one, with nothing out of the usual anywhere in sight. As we move into the new week, we may see some increase in windward showers at some point Monday into Tuesday, and then again later in the week…as the moisture of retired tropical cyclones from the eastern Pacific, get carried our way on the trade wind flow. This evening, I can’t quite decide if I’ll go see the new The X-Files: I Want To Believe film, or The Dark Knight (Batman) film. It will be one or the other, and I’ll be here early Saturday morning with my review. The next new narrative will be here before I take off to surf the Lahaina side in the morning, where I expect to find small waves, similar to last weekend…perhaps just barely large enough to make the drive worth it. At any rate, I hope you have a great Friday night wherever you happen to be spending it! Aloha for now…Glenn. 

Interesting: China’s efforts to clear the skies over its polluted capital are having an effect, officials said on Friday, insisting that Beijing’s air would be safe for Olympic athletes despite persistent smog over the city. Beijing authorities have taken cars off the road and opened new subway lines in the past week, in addition to halting some construction and suspending factory production, in a last-ditch effort to ensure clear skies when the Games open on August 8. "For the effects of the measures we have taken to be increasingly felt, we will have to make continued efforts," Du Shaozhong, of the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau, told a news conference. "Given the geographical location of Beijing, it is rather difficult to improve air quality and cut emissions," he said. The city’s chronic pollution, a source of respiratory illness, has been one of the biggest worries for Games organizers, who have had to deflect international criticism over air quality and who have struggled to contain the environmental effects of China’s breakneck economic growth.

Athletes have also expressed concern, with Ethiopia’s Haile Gebrselassie saying he will take part in the 10,000m race, but not the marathon, in Beijing due to worries about air quality, and others saying pollution levels could affect performance. Du conceded that Beijing‘s air quality on Friday was below par, meeting only level 3 on China‘s five-point scale air pollution index. But he said that the overall trend was improving, with a 20 percent reduction in carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter — all pollutants related to vehicle emissions — since the same period last year. According to China‘s Air Pollution Index, 22 days this month have been "blue-sky days", Du said. But the index is not internationally recognized, does not calculate the cumulative effect of different pollutants and omits several of them. 

Interesting2: Companies seeking oil in the Arctic will need better technology to clean up spills onto ice and could new face hazards such as rougher seas caused by climate change, experts said on Friday. The U.S. Geological Survey estimated this week that 22 percent of the world’s undiscovered, technically recoverable reserves of oil and gas were in the Arctic, raising environmentalists’ worries about possible impact on wildlife. "The Exxon Valdez showed what a catastrophe can be caused by oil in the Arctic," said Ilan Kelman, a scientist at the Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo. "The environment is remote, harsh and vulnerable."  The Exxon Valdez tanker ran aground off Alaska in 1989, spilling 11 million U.S. gallons of oil off Alaska and killing thousands of birds and marine mammals. Commercial Arctic oil exploitation began in Canada in the 1920s at Norman Wells but oil companies still lack full technology to handle spills, for instance, if oil seeps into or below ice floating on the sea.

"Responding to major oil spills remains a major challenge in remote, icy environments. This is especially true for spills in waters where ice is present," according to a 2007 report by the Arctic Council, grouping all governments with Arctic territory. New cleanup technologies "have yet to be fully tested…spill prevention should be the first priority for all petroleum activities," according to the study for the United States, Canada, Russia, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Iceland. Governments and oil companies are developing stringent safety standards to minimize risks of spills. The WWF environmental group urged a moratorium on all oil and gas exploration until there was proper anti-spill technology and an ability to deploy clean-up equipment quickly to remote sites hit by winter darkness.

Interesting3:

A new report released by Oceana today concludes that sharks are invaluable to maintaining healthy ocean ecosystems. Predators as Prey: Why Healthy Oceans Need Sharks shows that as shark populations decline, the oceans suffer unpredictable and devastating consequences. Sharks have unfortunately fallen victim to the man-hungry "Jaws" stereotype society has created for them. But as Shark Week nears, Oceana wants the world to know that what we should really fear are oceans without sharks. Sharks now represent the largest group of threatened marine species on the World Conservation Union’s (IUCN) Red List of threatened species. "Humans represent the greatest threat facing sharks today," said Elizabeth Griffin, marine wildlife scientist at Oceana.

"Without proper management and increased enforcement, some shark species are likely to go extinct." Each year, humans kill more than 100 million sharks worldwide. Shark finning alone kills 26 to 73 million sharks annually. Because shark carcasses are bulky, take up a lot of space and are less valuable, they are often thrown overboard. In fact, the practice of shark finning is extremely wasteful and only uses between one and five percent of the shark.  Sharks also are incidentally captured as "bycatch," a term used for unintended catch, in commercial fisheries. It is estimated that tens of millions of sharks are caught as bycatch each year, which is nearly half of the total shark catch worldwide. When sharks are caught as bycatch they are often thrown overboard, many of them dead or seriously injured.