September 23-24 2008
Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Tuesday afternoon:
Lihue, Kauai – 85
Honolulu, Oahu – 87
Kaneohe, Oahu – 83
Kahului, Maui – 84
Hilo, Hawaii – 81
Kailua-kona – 86
Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level, and on the highest mountains…at 4 p.m. Tuesday afternoon:
Port Allen, Kauai – 86F
Hilo, Hawaii – 81
Haleakala Crater – 52 (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 43 (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:
1.00 Mount Waialeale, Kauai
0.60 South Fork Kaukonahua, Oahu
0.07 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.00 Kahoolawe
1.31 Puu Kukui, Maui
0.20 Piihonua, Big Island
Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a 1024 millibar high pressure system located far to the northeast of Hawaii, with a long ridge extending from it to our north. This pressure configuration will keep trade winds blowing in the light to moderately strong category Wednesday and Thursday…locally stronger and gusty.
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
Aloha Paragraphs
Young Hula dancers on the island of Lanai
Photo Credit: flickr.com
Our early autumn trade winds will remain active across the tropical latitudes of the Hawaiian Islands. These trade winds will blow in the light to moderately strong range, although somewhat stronger in those typically windier areas around the state. The long range computer forecast models show no end in sight for these trade winds…although they will likely begin to become lighter Friday into the weekend.
An upper level trough of low pressure is still overhead here in the Aloha state. This will help to destabilize our atmosphere to some degree, making our local clouds more shower prone, especially on the Kauai end of the island chain. As clouds, carried by the trade winds, come under the influence of the trough, we’ll see some enhancement of the showers along the windward sides. The daytime heating could cause upcountry afternoon showers on the leeward sides too.
The latest GFS (Global Forecast System) computer model continues to show an area of low pressure developing to the south of the Hawaiian Islands over the next several days. This model wants this low pressure area, with its deep tropical moisture, to move northward over the state around next Monday. It’s still too early to lock this forecast down to securely, but it certainly warrants a close eye as we move through the rest of this week. If it were to manifest as the model suggests, we could see increased precipitation arriving then. The model goes on to show an early season cold front pushing southward towards the islands early next week as well. I think it would be wise this early in the game, to adopt a wait and see attitude about all of this for the time being. The NWS forecast office in Honolulu has now started talking about this area: "A weak low level circulation associated with a weak surface trough about 775 miles south of Kona was moving west near 15 miles an hour. Thunderstorms surrounding this system remain poorly organized. Any further development of this system is expected to be slow to occur."
It’s early Tuesday evening here in Kihei, Maui, as I begin writing this last paragraph of today’s tropical weather narrative from Hawaii. As you were reading in the paragraph above, there’s something that might begin to take shape to the south of the Hawaiian Islands over the next couple of days. This satellite image shows the area of investigation directly to the south of Hawaii. At the moment, what we see down there are the typical thunderstorms in the intra-tropical convergence zone…where the trade winds from the northern and southern hemisphere’s meet. It will be interesting to see over the next 2-3 days if the thunderstorms become more organized in that general area, and then migrate northward towards us over the weekend. At this point I’d go so far as to say it might happen…and then again it may not. ~~~ Tuesday turned out to be a nice day, as most days here in the Hawaiian Islands are, regardless of the season. Skies got cloudy locally, with some afternoon showers breaking out here and there, although few and far between. The island of Lanai was reporting heavy rain at 4pm, which is a little unusual. I see little in the way of change to our overall weather pattern Wednesday, continuing on into Friday, at least. ~~~ 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.
Interesting:
The first evidence that millions of tons of a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide is being released into the atmosphere from beneath the Arctic seabed has been discovered by scientists. The Independent has been passed details of preliminary findings suggesting that massive deposits of sub-sea methane are bubbling to the surface as the Arctic region becomes warmer and its ice retreats. Underground stores of methane are important because scientists believe their sudden release has in the past been responsible for rapid increases in global temperatures, dramatic changes to the climate, and even the mass extinction of species. Scientists aboard a research ship that has sailed the entire length of Russia’s northern coast have discovered intense concentrations of methane — sometimes at up to 100 times background levels — over several areas covering thousands of square miles of the Siberian continental shelf.
In the past few days, the researchers have seen areas of sea foaming with gas bubbling up through "methane chimneys" rising from the sea floor. They believe that the sub-sea layer of permafrost, which has acted like a "lid" to prevent the gas from escaping, has melted away to allow methane to rise from underground deposits formed before the last ice age. They have warned that this is likely to be linked with the rapid warming that the region has experienced in recent years. Methane is about 20 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and many scientists fear that its release could accelerate global warming in a giant positive feedback where more atmospheric methane causes higher temperatures, leading to further permafrost melting and the release of yet more methane. The amount of methane stored beneath the
Interesting2:
This month algae as a fuel source made the news several times. Last week, Sapphire Energy announced it received $100 million to help reach its goal of making commercial amounts of algae fuel in three to five years. Investors included Bill Gates Investment company, Cascade Investment, LLC. In June Sapphire received $50 million from investors. At the beginning of the month, Arizona State University (ASU) announced its partnership with Heliae Development, LLC and Science Foundation
To date, the company is the only one that has produced fuels that passed specification testing. In January Solazyme introduced the world’s first cars to run on algae biodiesel at the Sundance Film Festival during the premiere of the documentary Field’s of Fuel. Five years ago, we could not find a single venture capital firm that had ever heard of the concept of a biofuel,” Harrison Dillon, president and chief technology officer of Solazyme, told PBS’ NewsHour last spring. Times have changed, and now venture capitalists are banking on algae biodiesel as the next big fuel. The claims made by Green Chip Stocks (GCS) about algae are a good example. In a report, GCS claims that algae biodiesel could “supply all
Interesting3:
MIT researchers and colleagues are working to find out whether energy from trees can power a network of sensors to prevent spreading forest fires. What they learn also could raise the possibility of using trees as silent sentinels along the nation’s borders to detect potential threats such as smuggled radioactive materials. The U.S. Forest Service currently predicts and tracks fires with a variety of tools, including remote automated weather stations. But these stations are expensive and sparsely distributed. Additional sensors could save trees by providing better local climate data to be used in fire prediction models and earlier alerts. However, manually recharging or replacing batteries at often very hard-to-reach locations makes this impractical and costly.
The new sensor system seeks to avoid this problem by tapping into trees as a self-sustaining power supply. Each sensor is equipped with an off-the-shelf battery that can be slowly recharged using electricity generated by the tree. A single tree doesn’t generate a lot of power, but over time the "trickle charge" adds up, "just like a dripping faucet can fill a bucket over time," said Shuguang Zhang, one of the researchers on the project and the associate director of MIT’s Center for Biomedical Engineering (CBE). The system produces enough electricity to allow the temperature and humidity sensors to wirelessly transmit signals four times a day, or immediately if there’s a fire. Each signal hops from one sensor to another, until it reaches an existing weather station that beams the data by satellite to a forestry command center in
Interesting4:
Veiled Venus just got a little less mysterious in a new 3-D view that showcases the planet’s powerful winds. The European Space Agency’s Venus Express spacecraft tracked cloud movements hidden within the murky depths of Venus’ southern hemisphere, and scoped out the huge hurricane-like vortexes spinning over the planet’s poles. "Tracking them for long periods of time gives us a precise idea of the speed of the winds that make the clouds move and of the variation in the winds," said Agustin Sanchez-Lavega, a planetary scientist at the Universidad del Pais Vasco in
An instrument called the Venus Express Visual and Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer (VIRTIS) peered at visible cloud motions at the upper altitudes during the day, and switched to the infrared range of light to see lower cloud movements at night. The team found that the wind speed could vary from almost 230 mph (370 km/h) at the 41-mile altitude to roughly 130 mph (210 km/h) at the 28 to 29 mile altitude range. On Earth, wind speeds can regularly top 100 mph above 18,000 feet, and occasionally hit 200 mph at 30,000 feet. Such results could help researchers begin to understand the complex weather system of Earth’s neighboring planet.
Interesting 5:
Saturn’s rings may be much older and more massive than previously thought, according to a new study. The study’s computer simulation showed how the planet’s rings could date back billions of years ago to the early ages of the solar system, rather than only 100 million years ago (during Earth’s Age of Dinosaurs), as previous observations suggested. The calculations are consistent with recent observations of the rings by the Cassini–Huygens spacecraft currently studying Saturn and its moons. Larry Esposito and Joshua Elliott, both at the University of Colorado, modeled how meteorites smash into the rings, shattering the ring particles and coating each one in a layer of ice and dust.
Before, scientists had assumed that this shattering led to the eventual dissipation of the rings, but a new simulation, created by Glen Stewart and Stuart Robbins of the University of Colorado, shows that after breaking up, the particles could again clump together in a perpetual recycling process. Previously, researchers had thought the rings were relatively young because they appeared bright and pristine, not covered with the detritus of billions of years of meteorites smashing into them. But the new calculations show that if the effect of this clumping and re-clumping is taken into account, the dust would also be recycled through the rings and wouldn’t appear as dark as might be expected.
Interested6:
Summer 2008 in
One hundred years of daily temperature data in Los Angeles were analyzed by scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.; the University of California, Berkeley; and California State University, Los Angeles.
They found that the number of extreme heat days (above 90 degrees Fahrenheit or 32.2 degrees Celsius in downtown
Tamrazian and his colleagues analyzed data from
The team forecasts that in coming decades, we can expect 10- to 14-day heat waves to become the norm. And because these will be hotter heat waves, they will be more threatening to public health. "The bottom line is that we’re definitely going to be living in a warmer
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