Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs / September 26-27, 2008

September 26-27 2008

Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Friday afternoon: 

Lihue, Kauai – 85
Honolulu, Oahu – 85
Kaneohe, Oahu – 83
Kahului, Maui – 90
Hilo, Hawaii – 83
Kailua-kona – 85

Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level, and on the highest mountains…at 4 p.m. Friday afternoon:

Kahului, Maui – 87F  
Kaneohe, Oahu – 79

Haleakala Crater    – 57  (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 Friday afternoon:

0.87 Mount Waialeale, Kauai
0.45 Oahu Forest NWR, Oahu
0.10 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.01 Kahoolawe
0.34 West Wailuaiki, Maui
0.42 Pahoa, Big Island

Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing high pressure systems located to the northeast and northwest of Hawaii. A slowly approaching cold front will weaken the high pressure ridge to our north, causing our local winds to become lighter this weekend…with a tendency to be from the southeast. 

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. 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 Kohala coast on the Big Island of Hawaii
Photo Credit: flickr.com

The trade winds will finally give way to light and variable winds this weekend. These long lasting trade winds were already winding down in speed Friday. As we move into the weekend time frame, an approaching early season cold front will help weaken our trade wind producing ridge, with our local winds going light and variable in direction as a result. If the light air flow takes on a southeast orientation, we could see hazy conditions in some parts of the island chain…some of which would have volcanic origins. Cool (tropically speaking) north to northeast breezes will fill in behind an early season cold front Tuesday.

As light and variable breezes develop this weekend, the emphasis for showers will be over the interior sections during the afternoon hours. This convective weather pattern will provide decent weather during the morning hours, with quite a bit of sunshine in most areas. As the daytime heating of the islands takes place, clouds will form over and around the mountains during the late morning through the afternoon hours…leading to localized showers.

The computer models show an early season cold front pushing down into the state late Monday into Tuesday. This is not going to be a strong frontal cloud band, although it will bring some showers with it. The expectations are that it will bring showers to Kauai Monday night, and then drop down across Oahu and Maui during the day Tuesday…perhaps not quite reaching the Big Island. Relatively cool north to NE breezes riding in with the frontal boundary. This will bring our first touch of autumn weather, as high temperatures drop a few degrees lower than what they would otherwise be.

Satellite imagery continues to show a dissipating tropical disturbance to the south-southwest of the islands. During the last 24 hours it has lost some of its well defined organization however. Here’s a satellite image of that area of thunderstorms. The threat of its developing into a tropical cyclone has diminished. Nonetheless, the tops of the associated thunderstorms, in the form of high cirrus clouds, are being carried up over the southern part of the island chain. This area of disturbed weather will keep moving westward…and away from us.

We continue to set our sights on what will be a weekend of light and variable winds…with its afternoon cloudiness and localized upcountry showers, along with potentially hazy weather. Then, and this is where it gets more interesting, we’re expecting an early autumn cold front to arrive early in the new week ahead! It’s certainly not rare to have a weak cold front during the last few days of September, but then again, it’s not common either. Perhaps as noteworthy as the showers will be the cool air (in the tropical sense of the word) that will sweep into the state with its arrival. This may be a mark of the end of our summer season, even more so than than the calender oriented summer solstice, which we went through several days ago.

It’s early Friday evening here in Kihei, Maui, as I begin writing this last section of today’s tropical weather narrative from Hawaii. I’m about ready to leave Kihei, for the short drive over to Kahului. I’ll be taking in a new film called Eagle Eye (2008), starring Shia LaBeouf, Billy Bob Thorrnton, and Michelle Monaghan, among others. This action adventure film is a race against time, with two strangers thrown together by a mysterious phone call from a woman they have never met. Threatening their lives and family, she pushes these strangers into a series of increasingly dangerous situations – using the technology of everyday life to track and control their every move. As the situation escalates, these two ordinary people become the country’s most wanted fugitives, who must work together to discover what is really happening – and more importantly, why. I’ll of course let you know early Saturday morning what I thought about this just released film, but until then, here’s a trailer to give you a sneak peek. I hope you have a great Friday night until then! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting:

Rather than building stronger ocean-based structures to withstand tsunamis, it might be easier to simply make the structures disappear.  A collaboration of physicists from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and Aix-Marseille Universite in France and the University of Liverpool in England have conducted laboratory experiments showing that it’s possible to make type of dike that acts as an invisibility cloak that hides off-shore platforms from water waves. The principle is analogous to the optical invisibility cloaks that are currently a hot area of physics research. Tsunami invisibility cloaks wouldn’t make structures disappear from sight, but they could manipulate ocean waves in ways that makes off-shore platforms, and possibly even coastlines and small islands, effectively invisible to tsunamis. If the scheme works as well in the real world as the lab-scale experiments suggest, a tsunami should be able to pass right by with little or no effect on anything hidden behind the cloak.

Interesting2: Barack Obama and John McCain are promising voters a Tomorrowland of electric cars and high-speed trains and solar panels, a vision of American life without a drop of imported oil. But their plans to get there look more like Fantasyland. A host of energy policy experts agree that true "energy independence"—a key catch phrase of this presidential campaign—would be far more expensive and disruptive than either candidate is telling you. Our oil addiction hamstrings America‘s foreign policy and military, contributes to global warming and has robbed the nation of trillions of dollars. One of the country’s leading energy modelers estimates that foreign-oil dependence cost our economy $750 billion this year, a little more than the daunting price tag of the proposed Wall Street bailout. The main culprit sits in your driveway: Due largely to massive increases in highway fuel consumption, our oil imports doubled in the last 30 years.

But petroleum is everywhere—in asphalt, ink pens, burger wrappers. Replacing it won’t be nearly as easy as it sounds on the campaign trail. In speech after speech, McCain and Obama extol energy independence and rip the federal government’s failure to achieve it. McCain promises to secure "strategic independence" from foreign sources by 2025, with a plan that includes a $300 million prize for a super-efficient electric car battery. Obama pledges to effectively replace oil imports from the Middle East within a decade, largely by investing $150 billion in alternative fuels. Experts suggest the candidates are wildly understating the cost and time that true independence would require. The transition to a national life without imported oil appears so expensive that none of more than a dozen scientists and scholars interviewed by the Tribune could calculate a price tag. Only one even ventured a ballpark guess: $1 trillion to $2 trillion.

Interesting3: The discovery of rocks as old as 4.28 billion years pushes back age of most ancient remnant of Earth’s crust by 300 million years. McGillUniversity researchers have discovered the oldest rocks on Earth – a discovery which sheds more light on our planet’s mysterious beginnings. These rocks, known as "faux-amphibolites", may be remnants of a portion of Earth’s primordial crust – the first crust that formed at the surface of our planet. The ancient rocks were found in Northern Quebec, along the Hudson‘s Bay coast, 40 km south of Inukjuak in an area known as the Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt. The discovery was made by Jonathan O’Neil, a Ph.D. candidate at McGill’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Richard W. Carlson, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., Don Francis, a McGill professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, and Ross K. Stevenson, a professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM).

O’Neil and colleagues estimated the age of the rocks using isotopic dating, which analyzes the decay of the radioactive element neodymium-142 contained within them. This technique can only be used to date rocks roughly 4.1 billion years old or older; this is the first time it has ever been used to date terrestrial rocks, because nothing this old has ever been discovered before. "There have been older dates from Western Australia for isolated resistant mineral grains called zircons," says Carlson, "but these are the oldest whole rocks found so far." The oldest zircon dates are 4.36 billion years. Before this study, the oldest dated rocks were from a body of rock known as the Acasta Gneiss in the Northwest Territories, which are 4.03 billion years old. The Earth is 4.6 billion years old, and remnants of its early crust are extremely rare—most of it has been mashed and recycled into Earth’s interior several times over by plate tectonics since the Earth formed.

Interesting4: An area of the Pacific Ocean once thought to be cold and barren is warmer than scientists thought, a new study finds. The seafloor there might be teeming with life. A group of researchers dropped probes down to a flat region of the Pacific Ocean floor off the coast of Costa Rica and about the size of Connecticut to gauge the water temperature and flow there. To their surprise, the water spewing out of the typically cold ocean floor was warmer and faster than expected in this area. "It’s like finding Old Faithful in Illinois," said study team member Carol Stein of the University of Illinois at Chicago. "When we went out to try to get a feel for how much heat was coming from the ocean floor and how much sea water might be moving through it, we found that there was much more heat than we expected." The sea floor in this region, which lies some 2 miles below the ocean surface, is marked by 10 widely separated outcrops or mounts that rise from sediment covering the ocean crust made of volcanic rock about 20 to 25 million years old.

Large amounts of water gush through cracks and crevices in the ocean crust like geysers and pick up heat as they move through the insulated volcanic rock. While not as hot as water that runs through mid-ocean ridges formed by rising lava, the water is still much warmer than expected. This warmth opens up the possibility that the area could support life, such as bacteria, clams and tubeworm species recently found to be living near hot water discharges along mid-ocean ridges. "It’s relatively warm and may have some of the nutrients needed to support some of the life forms we see on the sea floor," Stein said. The researchers hope to follow up this study, detailed in the September 2008 issue of Nature Geoscience, by examining other areas of the ocean floor to see if they can find any similar to the one off the coast of Costa Rica.