Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs / August 12-13, 2008

The trade winds, despite their easing up, will continue to bring us passing windward biased showers at times…favoring the cooler night and early morning hours, when the atmosphere is most saturated. As the trade winds get lighter, we’ll likely find some increase in our afternoon convective cumulus cloudiness, with chance of a shower or two along the leeward coasts and slopes through Thursday. An area of tropical moisture associated with a former tropical disturbance to the east-southeast of the Big Island, will bring an increase in showers to that island, Maui and the other islands eventually too…Wednesday into Thursday. There’s a chance too, that former eastern Pacific hurricane Hernan, now downgraded into a tropical storm, may bring an even more productive slug of tropical moisture into the state this weekend. This satellite image shows these moisture areas, both with tropical origins…generally to the east of our islands, moving our way. Here’s a looping radar image, so we can keep track of these incoming shower areas.

It’s early Tuesday evening here in Kihei, Maui, as I begin writing this last section of today’s narrative.























The most interesting weather elements in the Pacific Ocean, at least those that might have some bearing on our weather here in Hawaii…continue to be tropical systems generally to our east. The first, and closest, is a diminished tropical disturbance to the ESE of the Big Island. Looking at satellite pictures, we find that all the recent thunderstorms have faded, leaving only a low level swirl of clouds as a marker for this weak tropical vortex. Nonetheless, it will prove capable of bringing increased showers into the Big Island and Maui, arriving Wednesday…then spreading up along the other islands through the night into Thursday, most generously along the windward sides, and around the mountains. Then, what was hurricane Hernan in the eastern Pacific, now downgraded to a tropical depression, continues to weaken. The latest track forecast has whatever is left of Hernan, slipping by to the south of the state, as perhaps a tropical disturbance with time. It appears that there is a very good chance of another potentially more substantial dose of showers, with their eastern Pacific tropical origins eventually too. At any rate, Tuesday was a lovely day here in the islands, with an extraordinary amount of warm Hawaiian sunshine beaming down! The trade winds remained somewhat stronger than expected, with a gust of 42 mph at Upolu Point on the Big Island, at 5pm, substantiating that fact! I’ll be back very early Wednesday morning with your next new weather narrative from paradise, I hope you have a great Tuesday night until then! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Mid-week music video, No Ordinary Love, by…Sade

Note: I will be flying to Honolulu late Wednesday afternoon, to attend a Climate Conference at the East West Center, on the campus of the University of Hawaii, Thursday and Friday. Friends on Oahu, who live on the windward side in Kailua, have invited me to spend some time with them Friday night, Saturday and Sunday. I will fly back to Maui late Sunday afternoon. This means that I























will not be doing my tv weather show on Thursday, and then again not on Friday…which is a local state holiday. I will not be updating this website as  regularly as usual, although will try to find time here and there for some comments along the way. The daily forecasts, in the upper left hand column on this and all other pages, will continue to have the latest Hawaiian weather information however. Glenn

Interesting:

Some large whale species such as the humpback, minke and southern right whale are recovering from a threat of extinction, helped by curbs on hunts since the 1980s, the world’s largest conservation network said on Tuesday. A review of cetaceans — about 80 types of whales, dolphins and porpoises — showed almost a quarter were in danger, mostly small species. Entanglement in fishing gear was the main threat, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) said. "For the large whales the picture looks guardedly optimistic," Randall Reeves, chair of the cetacean specialist group of the IUCN, told Reuters of the assessment of marine mammals for the IUCN’s "Red List" of endangered species. "The large whales, the commercially important ones, have for the most part responded well under protection," he said.

The IUCN groups governments, scientists and conservationists. The world imposed a moratorium on all hunts in 1986 after many species were driven towards extinction by decades of exploitation for meat, oil and whalebone. Japan, Norway and Iceland still hunt minke whales, arguing they are plentiful. The humpback whale, which grows up to 50 feet and is found in all the world’s oceans, was moved to "least concern" from "vulnerable" in the new Red List. The southern right whale, found in the southern hemisphere, and the common minke whale, living in the North Pacific and North Atlantic, were shifted down to the "least concern" category from the "lower risk" grouping.

Interesting2:

Heavy rain and thunderstorms which drenched the capital Beijing on Sunday continued into Monday, helping to clear the air and bringing more comfortable conditions for the Olympic competitors. Pollution has been a major worry in the run up to the Olympics. The Beijing Government has gone to extraordinary lengths to remedy the problem by closing down factories and moving as many as 2 million vehicles off the roads. On Saturday the air pollution index was recorded as 94 for the opening day of competition, where below 50 is considered healthy air. An index of over 100 is considered to be harmful to some people.

On Saturday a third of cyclists dropped out of the men’s road race unable to cope with the hot and stuffy conditions. Some relief arrived Sunday in the form of heavy rain and thunderstorms, though some events experienced delays or had to be re-scheduled. Beijing woke to clearer conditions on Monday and lower temperatures, with the haze having cleared. Pollution levels taken on Monday indicated that the pollution index had more than halved, dropping to 38. Scattered showers over the next few days should help to maintain the lower pollution levels. However, it will remain hot with highs near 29 or 30C (84-86F) and with relatively high humidity.

Interesting3:

A U.S. Coast Guard cutter will embark on an Arctic voyage this week to determine the extent of the continental shelf north of Alaska and map the ocean floor, data that could be used for oil and natural gas exploration. U.S. and University of New Hampshire scientists on the Coast Guard Cutter Healy will leave Barrow, Alaska, on Thursday on a three-week journey. They will create a three-dimensional map of the Arctic Ocean floor in a relatively unexplored area known as the Chukchi borderland. The Healy will launch again on September 6, when it will be joined by Canadian scientists aboard an icebreaker, who will help collect data to determine the thickness of sediment in the region. That is one factor a country can use to define its extended continental shelf. With oil at $114 a barrel, after hitting a record $147 in July, and sea ice melting fast, countries like Russia and the United States are looking north for possible energy riches.

"These are places nobody’s gone before, in essence, so this is a first step," said Margaret Hays, the director of the oceanic affairs office at the U.S. State Department. She said the data collected may provide information to the public about future oil and natural gas sources for the United States. This will be the fourth year that the United States has collected data to define the limits of its continental shelf in the Arctic. Russia, which has claimed 460,000 square miles of Arctic waters, last summer planted its flag on the ocean floor of the North Pole. Hays said the Alaskan continental shelf may lie up to 600 nautical miles from the coastline, far beyond the 200-mile (322-km) limit where coastal countries have sovereign rights over natural resources. The research could also shed light on other potential energy resources, like methane frozen in ice under the ocean, that Hays said might one day have some commercial interest. Larry Mayer, a university scientist, said melting sea ice, presumably from global warming, helped last year’s mission. "It was bad for the Arctic, but very very good for mapping."

Interesting4:

Climate change has shifted the boundaries of plant and animal habitats, with some birds in the United States extending their boundaries northward and trees moving farther up mountains, new studies show. Between 2000 and 2005, New York state’s Department of Environmental Conservation had thousands of volunteers all over the state observe and report the birds they could identify, creating a Breeding Bird Atlas of the various species’ breeding ranges. Researchers at the State University of New York (SUNY) compared this atlas to another one conducted between 1980 and 1985 for 83 species of birds that traditionally have bred in New York and found that many had extended their range boundaries northward, some by as many as 40 miles (64 kilometers).

"But the real signal came out with some of the northerly species that are more common in Canada and the northern part of the U.S.," said Benjamin Zuckerberg, a Ph.D. student at SUNY. "Their southern range boundaries are actually moving northward as well, at a much faster clip."  Some of the species making this southern boundary shift are the Nashville warbler, a little bird with a yellow belly; the pine siskin, a common finch that resembles a sparrow; and the red-bellied woodpecker, considered the most common woodpecker in the Southeast. The shifts, announced today, are occurring in a relatively short amount of time, the researchers also pointed out, happening in a matter of decades. These changes are also consistent with the predictions of regional warming, they added.