Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs

Nene…Hawaii’s state bird
Photo Credit: flickr.com

Light daytime onshore sea breezes, will give way to light offshore flowing land breezes at night through the remainder of this work week. We can refer to these light wind conditions as part of a convective weather pattern…with light and variable breezes blowing. The weather models show the trade winds returning again by the weekend…continuing into the following week.

The bias for showers will be over and around the mountains during the afternoon and early evening hours now. The beaches will be generally quite dry, as showers concentrate their efforts best in the upcountry areas. There may be times when those showers turn into brief downpours here and there. As the trade winds return by the weekend, showers will move back to the windward sides.

It’s Tuesday evening as I begin writing this last section of today’s narrative. As noted in the two paragraphs above, we’re now into a fairly well established convective weather pattern. A rapidly developing low pressure system, sometimes referred to in the meteorology community as an exploding low, or a bomb, with its associated cold front approaching the state from the NW…are causing this change in our weather conditions. This rather vigorous frontal boundary, at least for this time of year, will stall around the island of Kauai by Thursday. 

This cold front will push our trade wind producing high pressure ridge down over the islands Tuesday night. This will prompt clear skies, along with slightly cooler than normal early morning air temperatures…giving way to rather sultry conditions as the sun gets higher in the sky during the days. The daytime heating will cause clouds to build up over and around the mountains during the afternoons, with precipitation falling in the upcountry areas. Clouds typically evaporate again after dark, leading to a clear sky start to the next day.

~~~ Anyway, everything worked out, despite all those weird feelings that come to play when this kind of thing happens. I still have to wait to find out what is wrong with my car though, wish me luck! I’ll be back here with your next new weather narrative from hazy Hawaii, very early Wednesday morning. I hope you have a great Tuesday night wherever you happen to be spending it! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting: The sun bounces up and down as it roams the Milky Way, and such wavering might have hurled showers of comets Earth’s way that caused mass extinctions, including the one that killed the dinosaurs, a new study claims. Such cosmic impacts might also have spread life to alien worlds, scientists speculate. However, doubts have been raised about these suggestions. To arrive at the comet showers idea, astronomers calculated the path of our solar system across the Milky Way as it circles the galactic core. As we pass through the densest part of the galactic disk, the gravitational pull of the surrounding gas and dust clouds dislodges comets in the Oort Cloud in the outer solar system, causing these icy goliaths to plunge toward the sun, the researchers said. The sun passes through this galactic zone every 35 million to 40 million years, raising the chances of comets hurtling inward tenfold, according to calculations. This cycle seems to coincide with evidence of craters and mass extinctions on Earth, which suggest we suffer more collisions roughly every 36 million years.  

"It’s a beautiful match between what we see on the ground and what is expected from the galactic record," said researcher William Napier, an astronomer at the CardiffCenter for Astrobiology in Wales. He and his colleague Janaki Wickramasinghe will detail their findings in a forthcoming issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Although the solar bounce cycle may have been killer news for non-avian dinosaurs, pterosaurs, plesiosaurs, mosasaurs, and the many plant and invertebrate species that went extinct 65 million years ago, it may also have helped life spread to other planets. The comets may have blasted microbes off Earth that can withstand the interstellar void. "Microorganisms thrown into space from this barrage can pass straight into star- and planet-forming regions within the nebula, without being sterilized en route by cosmic rays," Napier told SPACE.com. "This opens the door to the exciting idea that life may spread not just within the solar system, but may be pan-galactic."

Interesting2: The deadly earthquake in China this week was devastating and felt across a vast area. The epicenter struck central China‘s SichuanProvince, yet it was felt as far away as Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam. And its origin was shallow. In short, it is exactly what seismologists fear could happen in Southern California some day. Scientists think the Sichuan earthquake was caused by seismic activity associated with the Indian land-mass colliding with the Asian continent (this same force has slowly built up the Himalaya mountain range). Because this week’s temblor was relatively shallow — 11.8 miles (19 km) below the ground — it caused especially violent quaking on the surface, which led to extensive damage. "Some of our worst-case scenarios would involve an earthquake somewhat like this on one of the faults that run through the L.A. region," said Thomas Heaton, a professor of engineering seismology at Caltech. "If we had one like this, it would be a tremendous natural disaster. We would expect to have extensive damage in the several hundred-billion dollar range."  

While this event was horrific, it is not the worst experienced in China‘s shaky past. A number of Earth’s deadliest earthquakes have occurred in China, including what is thought to be the deadliest in history, the 1556 quake in Shaanxi, China. Thought to be about a magnitude-8 event, this disaster caused an estimated 830,000 deaths. China‘s last major quake struck the city of Tangshan, near Beijing, in 1976. Though this temblor rated a 7.8 magnitude, less geologically severe than Monday’s earthquake (a 7.9 according to the U.S. Geological Survey), it caused far greater damage.  "Tangshan was a horrendous disaster," Heaton said today. "Basically every building in the city was leveled." Official figures put the death toll around 250,000 people, but it was likely closer to 500,000 to 750,000, Heaton said.  So far, the Sichuan earthquake has claimed at least 12,000 lives, and this figure is likely to rise.

Interesting3:  Enthusiastic response to an international tree- planting plan begun in 2006 prompted the UN Development Programme on Tuesday to set a new target of 7 billion trees planted by 2009. The programme had already exceeded its initial target of 1 billion trees, planting twice that many. The billion-tree campaign was launched by UNEP and the World Agroforestry Centre in Nairobi in November 2006 to counter the threats of global warming and help meet the challenge of water shortages and bio-diversity loss. The campaign went beyond the expectations of UNEP and its supporters, and has spread to 155 countries. "No one could have imagined it could have flowered so fast and so far," UNEP executive director Achim Steiner said at UN headquarters.

"Having exceeded every target that has been set for the campaign, we are now calling on individuals, communities, business and industry, civil society organizations and governments to evolve this initiative onto a new and even higher level" by the time the Climate Change Conference meets in Copenhagen in late 2009, Steiner said. If the new target is be reached by the end of next year, there would be a tree planted for each person on earth. The world population now stands at 6.6 billion. UNEP said the billion-tree campaign has become a "practical expression of private and public concern over global warming," which results from the trapping of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Over half of all trees planted since 2006 were in Africa, with Ethiopia leading with 700 million trees, UNEP said. Other significant tree planting took place in Turkey (400 million), Mexico (100 million) and Kenya (100 million).