Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs

Princeville, Kauai

The trade winds have picked up in strength now, becoming rather blustery in some places. We’ll see the trade winds increase another notch Thursday through the rest of the week. A small craft wind advisory is now active in Hawaii’s coastal and channel waters around Maui and the Big Island, which may be expanded a bit further up the chain into the weekend. These trade will blow through next Tuesday, at which point they will likely slow down, and perhaps become southeast…remaining light for several days thereafter.

Despite the stronger trade winds, we won’t see much of an increase in showers. The windward areas as usual will find the most generous rainfall.  The leeward beaches will be generally quite dry, although a few showers could fall along the Kona slopes of the Big Island during the afternoon or early evening hours. It appears that there will be little change in this favorably inclined trade wind weather pattern this week. We may see some changes occurring around the middle of next week.

It’s Wednesday evening as I begin writing this last section of today’s narrative. In the last sentence in the paragraph above, I intimated that there may be some changes starting around next Wednesday. The computer models want to have our winds getting much lighter then, and turn to the southeast. It’s still too early to totally accept this future possibility. If on the other hand, it were to occur as the models are pointing out, we would see the return of potentially thick vog, along with an increase in afternoon convective cloudiness and showers for a few days then. 

Note: I have not mentioned the devastating cyclone, named Nargis, which slammed into the river delta region in Myanmar (Burma). I was tracking the storm a week before it made landfall, as part of my duties at the Pacific Disaster Center here in Kihei, Maui, where I’m the senior weather analyst. So I have been very aware of the horrendous after-effects of this major storm…up to 100,000 deaths expected! There is certainly no lack of news, from various sources, which is the reason that I’m not including information about it on this website. I send my very best wishes to everyone involved in that area! Glenn

Interesting: China’s Huge Self-Sustaining Soar LED Wall, alled the GreenPix Zero Energy Media Wall, and with 2,292 individual color LEDs, comparable to a 24,000 sq. ft. monitor screen, it’s said to be the largest color LED display in the world. The wall is solar-powered too — photovoltaics are integrated into the wall’s glass curtain, and it harvests power during the day, to illuminate the display at night. Designed by, Simone Giostra & Partners Architects, the GreenPix wall is part of the Xicui Entertainment Complex in Beijing, near the site of the 2008 Olympics.  The polycrystalline photovoltaic cells are laminated within the glass of the curtain wall and placed with changing density on the entire building’s skin. The density pattern increases building’s performance, allowing natural light when required by interior program, while reducing heat gain and transforming excessive solar radiation into energy for the media wall. The building will open to the public in June 2008, with a specially commissioned program of video installations and live performances by artists.

Interesting2: Scientists have suggested that due to the adverse effects of Arctic ice melting, the hybrid of a polar bear and grizzly bear – dubbed the ‘grolar bear’, might rise in numbers.  According to a report in The Sun , the effects of climate change means that the hybrid bears could become more common as their habitats increasingly overlap due to global warming.  "One of the real things that is happening is that grizzlies are moving north, at the same time the polar bears are forced to be on the beach and we have found a number of grizzly bear polar bear hybrids," said biologist Dr George Divoky, who has worked in the Arctic region for over three decades.  "Essentially that could mean that it would save the polar bear genes in the grizzly population," he added. Biologists have already spotted the hybrid species.

Interesting3: Polar bears may have it relatively easy. It’s the tropical creatures that could really struggle if the climate warms even a few degrees in places that are already hot, scientists reported on Monday.  That doesn’t mean polar bears and other wildlife in the polar regions won’t feel the impact of climate change. They probably will, because that is where the warming is expected to be most extreme, as much as 18 degrees F (10 degrees C) by the end of this century.  But there are far fewer species living in the Arctic and Antarctic and in the temperate zones than in the tropics, said Curtis Deutsch of the University of California at Los Angeles.  Many of these tropical creatures are living at the edge of their temperature tolerance already. Even the slight tropical warming predicted by 2100 — 5.4 degrees F (3 degrees C) — could push them to the brink, Deutsch said in a telephone interview.  In research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Deutsch and his co-authors investigated what could happen to cold-blooded animals in the tropics over the next 100 years if the predictions of greenhouse warming hold true.  They chose cold-blooded creatures — mostly insects but also frogs, lizards and turtles — because warm-blooded animals have other ways of regulating their body temperatures, such as growing a thick coat of fur to guard against cold and shedding when it gets warm.

Interesting4: Climate change is harder on women in poor countries, where mothers stay in areas hit by drought, deforestation or crop failure as men move to literally greener pastures, a Nobel Peace laureate said on Tuesday. "Many destructive activities against the environment disproportionately affect women, because most women in the world, and especially in the developing world, are very dependent on primary natural resources: land, forests, waters," said Wangari Maathai of Kenya. "Women are very immediately affected, and usually women and children can’t run away," said Maathai, who won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize for her work on sustainable development.  "Men can trek and go looking for greener pastures in other areas in other countries … but for women, they’re usually left on site to face the consequences," she said. "So when there is deforestation, when there is drought, when there is crop failure, it is the women and children who are the most adversely affected." Maathai was in Washington with 1997 Nobel Peace laureate Jody Williams, who got the award for her work in creating an international treaty to ban landmines, and both spoke to reporters at a briefing. Williams said she saw climate change as a threat to security, and said desertification of former agricultural land fueled the conflict in Darfur.