April 14-15, 2009
Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Tuesday afternoon:
Lihue, Kauai – 75
Honolulu, Oahu – 81
Kaneohe, Oahu – 76
Kahului, Maui – 78
Hilo, Hawaii – 75
Kailua-kona – 80
Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level – and on the highest mountains…at 4 p.m. Tuesday afternoon:
Barking Sands, Kauai – 81F
Princeville, Kauai – 73
Haleakala Crater – 52 (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 39 (near 14,000 feet on the Big Island)
Precipitation Totals – The following numbers represent the largest precipitation totals (inches) during the last 24 hours on each of the major islands, as of Tuesday afternoon:
1.95 Mount Waialaele, Kauai
0.33 Poamoho 2, Oahu
0.00 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.00 Kahoolawe
4.12 Puu Kukui, Maui
2.21 Piihonua, Big Island
Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a 1031 millibar high pressure system located far to the northeast of the islands. This far away high pressure cell will have our trade winds blowing in the moderately strong Wednesday…becoming lighter Thursday.
Satellite and Radar Images: To view the cloud conditions we have here in Hawaii, please use the following satellite links, starting off with the Infrared Satellite Image of the islands to see all the clouds around the state during the day and night. This next image is one that gives close images of the islands only during the daytime hours, and is referred to as a Close-up visible image. This next image shows a larger view of the Pacific…giving perspective to the wider ranging cloud patterns in the Pacific Ocean. Finally, here’s a looping IR satellite image, making viewable the clouds around the islands 24 hours a day. To help you keep track of where any showers may be around the islands, here’s the latest animated radar image.
Hawaii’s Mountains – Here’s a link to the live webcam on the summit of near 14,000 foot Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. The tallest peak on the island of Maui is the Haleakala Crater, which is near 10,000 feet in elevation. These two webcams are available during the daylight hours here in the islands…and when there’s a big moon rising just after sunset for an hour or two! Plus, during the nights and early mornings you will be able to see stars, and the sunrise too…depending upon weather conditions.
Aloha Paragraphs
The island of Kauai
Art Credit: Pierre Bouret
Our trade winds will be gradually becoming lighter through the week…and will become very light Thursday into the weekend. The winds remain strong enough Tuesday evening however, that the NWS is keeping small craft wind advisories in those windiest areas around Maui and the
Clear to partly cloudy skies will prevail, with windward biased showers into Wednesday…and then afternoon clouds and few showers beginning Thursday. One area of high clouds is moving eastward, and has cleared the state to the east of the Big Island. As this looping satellite image
shows, it looks like we have another smaller batch of high clouds spreading into our area from the west…likely showing tonight, and may give us a nice sunrise Wednesday. Meanwhile, as the trade winds are blowing now, we’ll see the usual windward showers. As the winds get lighter Thursday through Saturday, we’ll begin to see some afternoon showers in the upcountry areas. The returning trade winds by Sunday, will allow showers to focus their efforts again along the windward coasts and slopes.
Recent computer model runs have changed their tune, adding a different twist to our local weather during the next week. Basically, they now extend the period of light winds, which may become southeast Friday into the weekend locally. Then hold off on bringing back the trade winds until some point late this weekend or early next week. We will see a gradual diminishing trade wind flow after mid-week. An approaching cold front, digging southward from the mid-latitudes, will weaken and erode our trade wind generating ridge of high pressure, to our north. We may begin to see some volcanic haze extending from the vents on the Big Island…over other parts of the state Thursday into Saturday.
It’s early Tuesday evening as I begin writing this last section of today’s weather narrative. Tuesday was another nice day, with lots of warm sunshine beaming down. When I went to lunch here in Kihei, my car thermometer, while driving down the street, read a very summery 88F degrees!
That hot temperature was over black asphalt, so wasn’t a true reading, but it gives you an idea of the kind of day it was. The beaches, especially along the south and west facing leeward beaches were quite exceptional…except where the gusty trade winds were blowing. ~~~ Looking out the window here in Kihei before I take the drive back upcountry, I see lots of blue skies out there. There are some clouds around too, but looking at this looping radar image, we don’t see many showers falling from them at the time of this writing. ~~~ As I was writing about in the paragraphs above, we have some changes on the horizon, with lighter winds making for sultry conditions starting around Thursday. Even as we move into this light wind regime, our weather will remain quite nice, with most of the showers, which aren’t expected to be widespread or heavy, occurring over and around the mountains during the afternoon hours. ~~~ Ok, time to get out on the road, no not for my walk, I have to wait until I get up to Kula for that, but on the highway for my more or less 40 minute drive home. I just sat out and watched the sunset, and I could see that next area of high cirrus clouds light up low on the horizon to the west. I’ll be back early Wednesday morning, and I hope to see you here again then! Aloha for now…Glenn.
Interesting: It’s not easy to kill a full-grown tree — especially one like the piñon pine. The hardy evergreen is adapted to life in the hot, parched American Southwest, so it takes more than a little dry spell to affect it. In fact, it requires a once-in-a-century event like the extended drought of the 1950s, which scientists now believe led to widespread tree mortality in the Four Corners area of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona. So, when another drought hit the area around 2002, researchers were surprised to see up to 10% of the piñon pines die off, even though that dry spell was much milder than the one before.
The difference in 2002 was the five decades of global warming that had transpired since the drought in the 1950s. That led terrestrial ecologists at the University of Arizona (UA) to pose the question: With temperatures set to rise sharply over the coming century if climate change goes unchecked, what impact will it have on the piñon pine? Unsurprisingly, the outcome doesn’t look good. In a new study published April 13 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), scientists at UA found that water-deprived piñon pines raised in temperatures about 7F above current averages, died 28% faster than pines raised in today’s climate.
It’s the first study to isolate the specific impact of temperature on tree mortality during drought — and it indicates that in a warmer world, trees are likely to be significantly more vulnerable to the threat of drought than they are today. "This raises some fundamental questions about how climate change is going to affect forests," says David Breshears, a professor at UA’s School of Natural Resources and a co-author of the PNAS paper. "The potential for lots of forest die-off is really there."
Interesting2: Ploughing up pasture to plant energy crops could produce more CO2 by 2030 than burning fossil fuels, if not done in a sustainable way, it said. Its study found waste wood and MDF produced the lowest emissions, unlike willow, poplar and oil seed rape. The EA wants biomass companies to report all greenhouse gas emissions. The agency is calling on the government to introduce mandatory reporting of greenhouse gas emissions from publicly-subsidized biomass facilities, to help work out if minimum standards need to be introduced.
Wood-burning stoves, boilers and even power stations are seen by many as critical to Britain’s renewable energy targets. Biomass is considered low carbon as long as what is burnt is replaced by new growth, and harvesting and transport do not use too much fuel.
Interesting3: At a time when water supplies are scarce in many areas of the United States, scientists in Minnesota are reporting that production of bioethanol — often regarded as the clean-burning energy source of the future — may consume up to three times more water than previously thought. Sangwon Suh and colleagues point out in the new study that annual bioethanol production in the U.S. is currently about 9 billion gallons and note that experts expect it to increase in the near future. The growing demand for bioethanol, particularly corn-based ethanol, has sparked significant concerns among researchers about its impact on water availability. Previous studies estimated that a gallon of corn-based bioethanol requires the use of 263 to 784 gallons of water from the farm to the fuel pump.
But these estimates failed to account for widely varied regional irrigation practices, the scientists say. The scientists made a new estimate of bioethanol’s impact on the water supply using detailed irrigation data from 41 states.
They found that bioethanol’s water requirements can be as high as 861 billion gallons of water from the corn field to the fuel pump in 2007. And a gallon of ethanol may require up to over 2,100 gallons of water from farm to fuel pump, depending on the regional irrigation practice in growing corn.
However, a dozen states in the Corn Belt consume less than 100 gallons of water per gallon of ethanol, making them better suited for ethanol production. "The results highlight the need to take regional specifics into account when implementing biofuel mandates," the article notes.
Interesting4: Rainforest reserves – even those disturbed by roads – provide an important buffer against fires that are devastating parts of the Brazilian Amazon, according to a new study by a trio of researchers at Duke University. "Our findings show that reserves are making a difference even when they are crossed by roads," said lead author, Marion Adeney, a PhD candidate at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. "We already knew, from previous studies, that there were generally fewer fires inside reserves than outside – what we didn’t know was whether this holds true when you put a road across the reserve."
Fire is one of the chief causes of deforestation in tropical rainforests. Fires in humid tropical forests are always caused by people, Adeney says – they typically start on farms or ranches and spread to the nearby forest. Since tropical forest trees have no natural protection against fire, even a small fire can kill most of the trees. Nearly 90 percent of fires occur within 10 kilometers of a road, a key factor, Adeney says, in explaining why fires are much more common and concentrated in the southern Amazon, where roads are more numerous.
Interesting5: Fast food and soft drinks may be making children fatter but they also make them happy. Programs aimed at tackling childhood obesity, by reducing children’s consumption of unhealthy food and drink, are likely to be more effective if they also actively seek to keep children happy in other ways, according to Professor Hung-Hao Chang from National Taiwan University and Professor Rodolfo Nayga from the University of Arkansas in the US. Determining whether reserves with roads provide protection against deforestation caused by fires was critical, she explains, because the pace of road-building has accelerated in recent years in many parts of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest, including in many reserves.
Especially important are the region’s indigenous reserves, which cover five times the area of fully protected parks. Despite having roads and settlements, many of these indigenous reserves contain ecologically important areas of rainforest still largely unaffected by the human development in surrounding areas.
"There is a lot of discussion about how to curb deforestation and fire as new roads are built or paved into these forests," says Adeney’s co-author and faculty co-advisor, Stuart Pimm, Doris Duke Professor of Conservation Ecology at Duke’s Nicholas School.
Childhood obesity is a major public health issue worldwide. It is well accepted that unhealthy eating patterns are partly responsible for the increase in childhood obesity. However, very little is known about the relationship between fast food and soft drink consumption and children’s happiness.
For the first time, Chang and Nayga looked at the relationship between unhealthy dietary habits and children’s psychological health. In particular, they studied the effects of fast food and soft drink consumption on children’s body weight and unhappiness. Using data from the National Health Interview Survey in Taiwan – a nationwide survey carried out in 2001 – the authors looked at the fast food and soft drink consumption, body weight and level of happiness of 2,366 children aged between 2 and 12 years old. Fast food included French fries, pizza and hamburgers; soft drinks included soda and other sugar-sweetened beverages.
A quarter of the children in the survey sample were overweight or obese and approximately 19 percent sometimes or often felt unhappy, sad or depressed. The study’s key finding was that children who ate fast food and drank soft drinks were more likely to be overweight, but they were also less likely to be unhappy.
The authors’ analysis also highlighted a number of factors influencing children’s body weight, eating patterns and happiness. For example, mothers’ consumption of fast food and soft drinks predicted her child’s eating habits. Those children who ate fast food were more likely to also consume soft drinks.
Children from lower income households were more likely to have unhealthy dietary habits and be overweight or obese. The authors conclude: "Our findings suggest that consumption of fast food and soft drinks can result in a trade-off between children’s objective (i.e. obesity) and subjective (i.e. unhappiness) well-being.
Interesting6: The threat of global warming can still be greatly diminished if nations cut emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases by 70 percent this century, according to a new analysis. While global temperatures would rise, the most dangerous potential aspects of climate change, including massive losses of Arctic sea ice and permafrost and significant sea level rise, could be partially avoided.
The study was led by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). "This research indicates that we can no longer avoid significant warming during this century," says NCAR scientist Warren Washington, the lead author.
"But if the world were to implement this level of emission cuts, we could stabilize the threat of climate change and avoid catastrophe." Average global temperatures have warmed by close to almost 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit since the pre-industrial era. Much of the warming is due to human-produced emissions of greenhouse gases, predominantly carbon dioxide.
This heat-trapping gas has increased from a pre-industrial level of about 284 parts per million (ppm) in the atmosphere to more than 380 ppm today. With research showing that additional warming of about 1.8 degrees F may be the threshold for dangerous climate change, the European Union has called for dramatic cuts in emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The U.S. Congress is also debating the issue.
Interesting7: Almost nine out of 10 climate scientists do not believe political efforts to restrict global warming to 2C will succeed, a Guardian poll reveals today. An average rise of 4-5C by the end of this century is more likely, they say, given soaring carbon emissions and political constraints. Such a change would disrupt food and water supplies, exterminate thousands of species of plants and animals and trigger massive sea level rises that would swamp the homes of hundreds of millions of people.
The poll of those who follow global warming most closely exposes a widening gulf between political rhetoric and scientific opinions on climate change. While policymakers and campaigners focus on the 2C target, 86% of the experts told the survey they did not think it would be achieved. A continued focus on an unrealistic 2C rise, which the EU defines as dangerous, could even undermine essential efforts to adapt to inevitable higher temperature rises in the coming decades, they warned.
Interesting8: Solar power beamed down from space will generate electricity for California homes as soon as 2016, under a new plan by a utility company to ramp up renewable energy technology far beyond solar panels on roofs. PG&E would buy 200 megawatts of space solar power from Solaren Corp. over 15 years under a power purchase agreement, enough to power tens of thousands of homes. The utility company has begun seeking approval for the deal from California state regulators.
Solaren would use solar panels on satellites in orbit to capture the sun’s power, and then convert it into radio frequency energy that could beam down to a receiving station. The energy would then undergo a conversion to electricity and feed into PG&E’s power grid. Having solar panels in orbit could provide a clean, reliable source of solar power that avoids the interruptions of cloudy days and bad weather on Earth.
That tempting prospect has led NASA and the U.S. Defense Department to investigate possibilities for space solar power, despite the hefty cost of launching solar panels into orbit. A former NASA scientist went so far as to demonstrate the radio wave transmission technology that would carry energy from space to Earth. He and his team transmitted solar power over a distance of 92 miles between two Hawaiian islands, during a four-month experiment in 2008.
Interesting9: We tend to think of Neanderthals as one species of cavemen-like creatures, but now scientists say there were actually at least three different subgroups of Neanderthals. Using computer simulations to analyze DNA sequence fragments from 12 Neanderthal fossils, researchers found that the species can be separated into three, or maybe four, distinct genetic groups.
The evidence points to a subgroup of Neanderthals in Western Europe, another in Southern Europe near the Mediterranean, a third in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and possibly a fourth in Western Asia. These groups have been postulated before, but this is the first study analyzing DNA data to look for genetic variations differentiating the subgroups.
Neanderthals are a hominid species that lived between about 130,000 and 30,000 years ago. They coexisted with humans for a while, and may even have interbred with us. "Because the Neanderthals lived in a very vast territory, and their evolution took place over a very long time, we wonder if there were sub-populations, or if it was a unique population," said researcher Silvana Condemi, a paleoanthropologist at the Universite de la Mediterranee-CNRS-EFS in France.
"Other studies show differences between Neanderthals and modern humans. For the first time we are working just within Neanderthals and taking into account the diversity within that group." Condemi and Virginie Fabre and Anna Degioanni, also of the Universite de la Mediterranee, describe their findings in the April 13 issue of the journal PLoS ONE. The researchers tested various hypotheses, including that all Neanderthals belonged to a single homogeneous population, or that Neanderthals could be divided into two, three, or more subgroups.
They found that the three- and four-group model best fit the data by accounting for the genetic discrepancies seen in the samples. The authors admit that their categorization is based on limited data, since they only have fragments of mitochondrial DNA sequences from a small sample of individuals. Princeton University paleoanthropologist Alan Mann agreed, and said it’s too early to draw bounds around sub-populations because we don’t have any data from individuals outside of the bounds, such as from Neanderthals in Africa or Southeast Asia.
"My view is this is very interesting research but it’s very premature in our study to be able to draw any but the most generalized and preliminary conclusions," he said in a phone interview. "I like the data they present. But at the moment we have to be extremely careful about exactly what we make of this."
In the future, the researchers would like to compare their genetic data to what is known about physical distinctions among Neanderthals from different regions, as well as cultural differences, such as unique tool use among various populations. "What is nice is that there are some variations in the genetics, and we see also from the bones and teeth that there is some variation," Condemi told LiveScience. "We give a confirmation that the Neanderthals are not one homogeneous group.
Interesting10: Huge volumes of captured fish go to waste either because they’re non-target species or because fishing fleets make no effort to record and manage non-target species sustainably. That’s the conclusion of an international study by WWF, which estimates how much of the fish harvest goes to waste as bycatch, the species thrown back dead into the sea or used for other purposes, such as feed for aquaculture.
WWF says the study reinforces the need for a complete paradigm shift in how fisheries are managed, so that everything taken from the sea is accounted for. What’s also needed is a clear and consistent new definition of bycatch to avoid existing disparities in how "waste" fish is recorded and accounted for.
"We want to see everything taken out to be managed in some way to make sure we are fishing within the limits of what’s sustainable," says study author, Robin Davies of WWF International. Davies suggests that from now on, bycatches should include fish that are either unused and or thrown back, or fish that are caught but are not currently monitored to check for any species in danger.
Two earlier landmark studies cited by Davies estimated that between 7 and 27 million tons of fish go to waste as bycatch. Davies new study estimates that 38 million tons go to waste, some 40 per cent of the total tonnage landed. "If 40 per cent of the global catch is unused or unmanaged, how can we make sure it’s fished sustainably?" says Davies, whose study will appear in Marine Policy later this month.
Davies arrived at the estimates by analyzing public fisheries data from 2000 to 2003, covering 44 countries, two oceanic regions (the northeast Atlantic, and the Mediterannean and Black Seas) and global tuna and sharkfin fisheries. The waste was greatest in sharkfin fisheries, which typically discarded 92 per cent of non-target species.
Email Glenn James: