April 18-19, 2009
Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Saturday afternoon:
Lihue, Kauai – 77
Honolulu, Oahu – 81
Kaneohe, Oahu – 78
Kahului, Maui – 81
Hilo, Hawaii – 79
Kailua-kona – 79
Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level – and on the highest mountains…at 5 p.m. Saturday evening:
Barking Sands, Kauai – 82F
Barking Sands, Kauai – 75
Haleakala Crater – 55 (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 36 (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 Saturday afternoon:
0.43 Wailua, Kauai
0.03 Waimanalo, Oahu
0.00 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.00 Kahoolawe
0.01 Hana airport, Maui
0.13 Mountain View, Big Island
Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a 1029 millibar high pressure system located far to the east-northeast of the islands. A high pressure is sitting right over the islands this weekend. Winds will be light and variable, gradually taking on a more southerly flow ahead of a weakening cold front.
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
Swimming with the Dolphins…Oahu
A high pressure ridge has been pushed southward over the Hawaiian Islands this weekend…which will keep our winds light. The lack of our usual breezy trade winds will keep our overlying atmosphere on the muggy side. The latest computer forecast guidance suggests that we have some changes in store during the next week. As a cold front pushes southward towards the islands, our winds will turn south to southwest. As the frontal boundary moves over the state Sunday night through Tuesday, our winds will turn north to northeast…ushering in somewhat cooler weather through most of the new week ahead.
Sunday will be a transition day, from the light and variable wind regime…switching to Kona breezes ahead of a cold front…ending up with showers Monday onwards. The blue sentence above describes what would be quite common during the winter months. If it all manifests as expected, this will turn out to be a little unusual for the spring season. There is still some question to all the particulars, but the theme above seems fairly reasonable for the time being…stay tuned.
Besides the lower level clouds, which will form over and around the islands, we’ve also have quite a bit of the higher cirrus variety around lately too. As this looping satellite image shows, we’ll continue to see rather thin high cirrus clouds continuing to move in our direction from the west Saturday night into Sunday. Expanding our view, with this looping satellite image of the greater central Pacific a bit more, we can see more of this cirrus taking aim on our islands now. At the same time, we’re able to spot the late season cold front approaching from the north.
When I got off work Friday evening I went to see the new filmed called State of Play (2009), starring Russell Crowe and Rachel McAdams, among others. The long and short of this film is that a reporter uncovers a deadly conspiracy when a star congressman’s mistress is brutually murdered. It’s being billed as a dramatic film, with of course the usual violence, sexual references, and drug content. So, this doesn’t sound like a film for everyone! As it turns out, I really enjoyed this film very much, it was complex and engaging, and pulled me right in! Here’s a trailer in case you are interested. ~~~ When I got out of the movie, I drove down to Paia, and met a friend there. We went dancing at one of the restaurants, and had fun. The dancing didn’t start until around 1045pm, which makes for a late night. I got home at around 130am Saturday morning…which was an usually late bedtime for me!
It’s Saturday evening as I begin writing this last section of today’s weather narrati ve.
Saturday was a good day, a little slow due to my late night activity Friday…which was good for me. Looking out the window of my weather tower this evening, it’s hazy here on Maui. It’s clear to partly cloudy in general, with light winds blowing. I went down to Paia to shop during the afternoon, and found nice sunny skies over on that windward side. Looking over that way, it still is near cloud free, and I’m sure very nice on the beaches there. Actually, I’m quite sure almost all the beaches around the Aloha state are very pleasant, ready for a good sunset. ~~~ I’m staying home tonight, will sit out on my deck and enjoy the sunset. I’ll be back Sunday morning with your next weather narrative, I hope you have a great Saturday night until then! Aloha for now…Glenn.
Interesting: More consumer products are claiming to be environmentally responsible, but nearly all of them make at least one claim that is unverifiable, according to a recent study. TerraChoice, an environmental marketing agency with offices in Ottawa and Philadelphia, says more than 98 per cent of the products it surveyed committed at least one of the "seven sins of greenwashing."
"The good news is that the growing availability of green products shows that consumers are demanding more environmentally responsible choices, and that marketers and manufacturers are listening," TerraChoice president Scott McDougall said in a release. "The bad news is that some marketers are exploiting consumers’ demand for third-party certification by creating fake labels or false suggestions of third-party endorsement."
Interesting2: The long-awaited, often-advertised Peapod will be available for order on Earth Day, April 22. Coincidentally, the 22nd also is Administrative Assistant’s Day. We expect to see a lot of greenies and maybe some secretaries tooling around in their $12,500 Peapods at no more than 25 miles an hour.
While the Peapod prototype had clear driver and passenger doors that looked like a Dyson vacuum cleaner, the production version (shown above) of the neighborhood electric vehicle resembles George Jetson’s Deux Chevaux.
Company director and brand guru Peter E. Arnell, whose initials inspired the company’s name, told Treehugger.com the car’s appearance was inspired by "Japanese bullet trains, storm troopers from the film Star Wars, space helmets and turtles."
There’s also a very prominent "smile" to the car’s grill, but what else would you expect from a man whose firm devised Pepsi’s new logo with the Cheshire grin and laughably pretentious backstory? The feel-good vibe continues with a glance at the in-dash iPod (sold seperately).
Edmunds says every trip concludes with a carbon-footprint analysis, while another app tells you exactly how much money you’ve saved by leaving the family truckster at home. Arnell says the Peapod isn’t a neighborhood electric vehicle, even if the National Highway Transportation Safety Board and his company’s own website do.
Arnell callls it a Mobi, a new category he’s "branded" in much the same way automakers branded 4x4s "SUVS." Regardless of what you call it, the Peapod tops out as 25 mph as required by law for NEVs.
Interesting3: A coalition of associations and entities affected by the impact of introduction of gray wolves into Wyoming filed a 60-day notice of intent to sue the federal government about its refusal to delist wolves in Wyoming. The intent to sue was filed April 3 after the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service published the delisting rules in the Federal Register.
The coalition is comprised of the Wyoming Wool Growers Association, Wyoming Stock Growers Association, Wyoming Farm Bureau Federation, Wyoming Association of Conservation Districts, Rocky Mountain Farmers Union, Wyoming Association of County Predatory Animal Boards, Niobrara County Predatory Animal Board, Wyoming Outfitters & Guides Association, Cody Country Outfitters and Guides Association and Sportsmen for Fish & Wildlife Wyoming.
The Wolf Coalition served notice of intent to sue Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, USFWS Acting Director Rowan Gould and Stephen Guertin, USFWS Acting Regional Director for the Mountain Region. The coalition intends to seek injunctive relief for violation of the Endangered Species Act and its related regulations and policies.
The Wolf Coalition attorney Harriet Hageman said claims arise from the USFWS rejection of the Wyoming Wolf Management Plan, its failure to delist the gray wolf population in Wyoming and its decision to proceed with delisting in Montana, Idaho and parts of Oregon and Washington
Interesting4: The Tecnalia Health and Quality of Life Unit is taking part in the Companionable project, the aim of which is to contribute to the enhancement of the quality of life of elderly and disabled persons using robotized solutions designed to operate in intelligent homes. The initiative, part of the European Union 7th Framework Program, combines for the first time the use of robot in intelligent domestic environments, with the goal of creating a companion that assists people in their own home and helps them to be independent in their everyday lives. Amongst other aspects, this tool provides a control for recognizing emotional states, social and health services support and for videoconferencing with family members or professional careers.
The main lines of research of Companionable involve the development of technologies to create a system that is conscious of its surroundings, with networks of sensors and communications, and the development and design of a mobile robot for therapeutic treatment and care support. The project has set itself the goal of developing a system which is aware of the presence of persons within an intelligent and domotic household, and which interacts with them in a natural and intuitive form.
Interesting5: Heading into a period of the Martian year prone to major dust storms, the team operating NASA’s twin Mars rovers is taking advantage of eye-in-the-sky weather reports. On April 21, Mars will be at the closest point to the sun in the planet’s 23-month, elliptical orbit. One month later, the planet’s equinox will mark the start of summer in Mars’ southern hemisphere. This atmospheric-warming combination makes the coming weeks the most likely time of the Martian year for dust storms severe enough to minimize activities of the rovers.
"Since the rovers are solar powered, the dust in the atmosphere is extremely important to us," said Bill Nelson of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., chief of the engineering team for Spirit and Opportunity. Unexplained computer reboots by Spirit in the past week are not related to dust’s effects on the rover’s power supply, but the dust-storm season remains a concern. Spirit received commands Tuesday to transmit more engineering data in coming days to aid in diagnosis of the reboots.
After months of relatively clear air, increased haze in March reduced Spirit’s daily energy supply by about 20 percent and Opportunity’s by about 30 percent. Widespread haze resulted from a regional storm that made skies far south of the rovers very dusty. Conditions at the rovers’ sites remained much milder than the worst they have endured.
In July 2007, nearly one Martian year ago, airborne dust blocked more than 99 percent of the direct sunlight at each rover’s site. The rovers point cameras toward the sun to check the clarity of the atmosphere virtually every day. These measurements let the planning team estimate how much energy the rovers will have available on the following day.
Observations of changes in the Martian atmosphere by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which reached Mars in 2006, and NASA’s Mars Odyssey, which reached Mars in 2001, are available to supplement the rover’s own skywatch. The Mars Color Imager camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter sees the entire planet every day at resolution comparable to weather satellites around Earth.
Interesting6: Sea levels could rise by a "catastrophic" 10 feet by the end of the century – putting millions of people at risk of flooding with coastal cities such as London, New York, Tokyo and Calcutta submerged, according to a new study. The melting of the vast ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland caused water to pour into the world’s oceans at an alarming rate at the end of the last period of global warming, the study shows.
Analysis of fossilized coral reefs off the Gulf of Mexico found many died during this time – known to climatologists as an "interglacial" – and were replaced by new reefs on higher ground. This happened over a long-term ecological timescale and was caused by a rapid jump in sea level of between 6.5ft and 9.8ft (two to three meters) that occurred around 121,000 years ago, say the researchers.
The findings published in Nature raise concerns that current climate change could yield similar quick ice loss and disastrous sea-level rise in the near future. Dr Paul Blanchon, a marine scientist of the National University of Mexico in Cancun, said his study shows there was a spell of swift melting during the warmest part of the last interglacial.
With growing evidence for contributions from the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets to sea-level rise, the findings confirm the potential that continuing rapid ice loss could cause disastrous sea-level rise by 2100. Dr Blanchon said this is also bad news for modern coral reefs which are already suffering because of human activity.
He said: "Knowing the rate at which sea level reached its high-stand during the last interglacial period is fundamental in assessing if such rapid ice-loss processes could lead to future catastrophic sea-level rise. "The best direct record of sea level during this high-stand comes from well-dated fossil reefs in stable areas. "Here we present a complete reef-crest sequence for the last interglacial high-stand from the stable north-east Yucatan peninsula in Mexico.
"The abrupt demise of the lower-reef crest allows us to infer that this occurred on an ecological timescale and was triggered by a two-to-three meter jump in sea level. "We constrain this jump to have occurred 121,000 years ago and conclude it supports an episode of ice-sheet instability during the terminal phase of the last interglacial period."
The prediction is not as high as those from some scientists who have warned sea levels may rise as much as 16 feet (five meters) by the end of the century. But a rise of even a meter could have major implications for low-lying countries whose economies are not geared up to build sophisticated sea defense systems, such as Bangladesh.
Interesting7: A new kind of tree could cool the planet by removing a major greenhouse gas from the planet’s atmosphere. What researchers are calling artificial trees, actually towers filled with various materials that adsorb carbon dioxide from the air, could play a major role in reducing climate change — if they prove profitable. "This is an industry still in its infancy," said Billy Gridley of Global Research Technologies, LLC, the company creating the C02-scrubbing towers. "This will eventually rival the size of today’s energy markets.
Interesting8: An asteroid is hurtling toward the planet and threatens to destroy life as we know it. What can humankind do, other than cower? Tie the thing down, suggests aerospace engineer David French of North Carolina State University. He has proposed a way to divert asteroids and other threatening objects by attaching a long tether and ballast.
Done right, "you change the object’s center of mass, effectively changing the object’s orbit and allowing it to pass by the Earth, rather than impacting it," French said in a statement. In March an asteroid passed by Earth at a distance of just about 49,000 miles.
NASA’s Near Earth Object Program has identified more than 1,000 "potentially hazardous asteroids." None is on a collision course with Earth but asteroids have struck before and almost certainly will again, scientists agree.
"For example, about 65 million years ago, a very large asteroid is thought to have hit the Earth in the southern Gulf of Mexico, wiping out the dinosaurs, and, in 1907, a very small airburst of a comet over Siberia flattened a forest over an area equal in size to New York City," French said.
"The scale of our solution is similarly hard to imagine." His idea, to be presented in September at an American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics conference, calls for using a tether somewhere between 600 miles and 60,000 miles long to change the trajectory of any object headed toward Earth.
"Nuclear weapons are an intriguing possibility, but have considerable political and technical obstacles. Would the rest of the world trust us to nuke an asteroid? Would we trust anyone else?" Frenach asked.
"And would the asteroid break into multiple asteroids, giving us more problems to solve?" Other solutions that have been proposed include crashing a spacecraft into the asteroid, focusing the Sun’s energy to deflect it, or using a laser to break it up.
Interesting9: For Arctic peoples, global warming is not just transforming their land, it is also poisoning their food. Mercury levels in seals and beluga whales eaten by Inuit in northern Canada have reached levels that would be considered unsafe in fish. Now, Gary Stern of Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and colleagues have found that seal meat contains more mercury in low-ice years, suggesting the problem will only get worse.
The team sampled ringed seals caught by traditional hunters in the western Canadian Arctic between 1973 and 2007. Mercury levels were higher after summers with less sea ice. They think this is because Arctic cod flourishes in low-ice years. Because Arctic cod is higher up the food chain than the seals’ other food, their tissues accumulate more mercury (Environmental Science and Technology.
Arctic residents may well be exposed to other pollutants, too. Melting ice releases chemicals such as DDT and PCBs that leached from the atmosphere decades ago and became entombed in ice and permafrost, warns Philippe Grandjean of Harvard University.
As the ice melts, its contaminants flow into streams, rivers and the Arctic Ocean. It may already be too late to prevent a surge of pollutants from polar ice, says Grandjean. However, he notes, policy-makers can try to prevent the same thing happening again by reducing pollutants still in use, such as flame retardants.
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