Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs / November 12-13, 2008

November 12-13 2008

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

Lihue, Kauai – 81
Honolulu, Oahu – 84
Kaneohe, Oahu – 84
Kahului, Maui – 88
Hilo, Hawaii – 81
Kailua-kona – 83

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

Port Allen, Kauai – 84F  
Hilo, Hawaii – 72 (light rain)

Haleakala Crater    – 50  (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 Wednesday afternoon:

0.35 Mount Waialeale, Kauai
0.08 Poamoho 2, Oahu
0.01 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.00 Kahoolawe
0.15 Oheo Gulch, Maui
0.13 Glenwood, Big Island

Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a high pressure ridge north of Kauai moving south slowly and weakening, as a cold front approaches the state from the northwest. This front will dissipate gradually north of Kauai from tonight through Saturday. High pressure will build north of the islands starting Sunday…bringing back the trade winds then.

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

      

Sand Crab watching the full moon rise in Hawaii

The trade winds will be fading soon, as a cold front pushes our trade wind producing high pressure ridge closer to the islands. This rather impressive looking cold front, located to the north and northwest of Hawaii at mid-week, as shown in this satellite image…is moving in our direction. The high clouds out ahead of the front continue moving our way steadily. The leading edge of layered clouds, directly associated with the front, are still a distance northwest of Kauai. This frontal boundary is pushing our trade wind producing ridge of high pressure southward closer to the state. Our local winds will become lighter, with a turning of the easterly trade winds, towards the southeast soon. Southeast winds will carry volcanic haze up from the BigIsland, over much of the rest of the Aloha state during the next couple of days. Look for the trade winds to return during the upcoming weekend, blowing the haze away.

The small craft advisory, which was active as recently as Tuesday night, has been cancelled…as we move into a lighter winded convective weather pattern. This will provide generally clear to partly cloudy mornings, with slightly cooler than normal air temperatures by dawn. As the daytime heating occurs, we’ll find afternoon clouds gathering over and around the mountains. These convective cumulus clouds will provide localized interior showers, which can spread down towards the coasts locally. This will all begin to happen as this autumn cold front, moves in our direction. As the front dissipates near Kauai or Oahu, the trade winds will bring back some windward biased showers this weekend. There’s a chance of wetter weather during the first part of next week, which would occur generally along the windward sides, as trade winds carry leftover moisture, from the cold front, in our direction. The models, at least the GFS model run for next week, gives a rather moist appearance to our local skies.

This was my first full day back to work, after a long vacation to California and Baja, Mexico. You can check out my comings and goings while away, by going to the Archived Narratives section, on the left hand margin of this page. Once there, scroll down a few postings to find the Vacation Reports narrative. ~~~ Meanwhile, at 8:17pm Wednesday evening, at least here in the islands, our moon will be at its fullest extent in terms of brightness. ~~~ As noted in the two paragraphs above, we’re moving quickly into a lighter wind pattern, with hazy conditions right around the corner. This volcanic haze will last for several days, so that you folks who have health related problems, should begin to make plans to remain calm, cool, and collected. ~~~ The resultant convective weather pattern will cause cloudy afternoons, leading to showers locally, they shouldn’t be overly heavy though. Wednesday started off nicely, as expected, with those afternoon clouds stacking-up right on schedule. Here in Kihei, where I spent the day working at the Pacific Disaster Center, we saw a brief period of light showers falling. The clouds should part way after the sunset, exposing the full moon nicely. ~~~ I’ll be back very early Thursday morning with your next new weather narrative, I hope you have a great, moonlight filled night until then! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting:

Japan’s greenhouse gas emissions rose to a record high in the year to March, putting the world’s fifth-largest carbon dioxide producer at risk of an embarrassing failure to achieve its Kyoto target over the next four years. The increase of 2.3 percent last year, largely due to the closure of Japan‘s biggest nuclear power plant after an earthquake, will ratchet up the pressure for it to give up its efforts to control emissions through voluntary measures and adopt tougher limits on industry like the European Union and Australia. With developing countries already questioning Tokyo‘s political will to rein in emissions and top CO2 polluters China, the United States and India free from Kyoto‘s 2008-2012 targets, Japan‘s actions will be seen as a milestone as governments struggle to agree on a successor to the protocol next year.

Emissions rose to 1.371 billion metric tons of CO2 equivalent in the Japanese fiscal year through March, after a 1.3 percent decline the previous year, Ministry of the Environment data showed on Wednesday. Analysts said immediate action was called for if Japan was to cut emissions by the estimated 13.5 percent needed to hit its 2008-2012 target under Kyoto of just under 1.2 billion tons, down 6 percent from 1990 levels. "We immediately need a set of effective policies to drive a change towards a more climate-friendly society," Tetsunari Iida, executive director of Tokyo‘s Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies (ISEP), an environment policy NGO. Unlike the European Union, Japan has been reluctant to set a mandatory cap or a carbon tax on companies’ emissions. Steelmakers and other manufacturers resist such caps, saying they would hurt their products’ worldwide competitiveness.

Interesting2:

This year is on track to be about the 10th warmest globally since records began in 1850 but gaps in Arctic data mean the world may be slightly underestimating global warming, a leading scientist said on Tuesday. A natural cooling of the Pacific Ocean known as La Nina kept a lid on temperatures in 2008 despite an underlying warming trend, said Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England. "This year is about 10th," he told Reuters in a telephone interview. "La Nina in the Pacific lasted longer than we envisaged." Jones’s unit is one of the main sources of global climate data for the United Nations. The warmest year on record was 1998, followed by 2005 and 2003, with other years this century closely bunched. Tenth place would make 2008 the least warm since 1999.

The update marginally cools an estimate from January, when Jones’s unit and the British Met Office (Britain‘s meteorological service) estimated that 2008 would be "another top 10 year," near the bottom of the ranking. The U.N. Climate Panel says human emissions of greenhouse gases, mainly from burning fossil fuels, are blanketing the planet. Rising temperatures will bring more floods, heat waves, more powerful storms and rising sea levels, it says. Jones said temperature records may fractionally underestimate warming because of gaps in measurements in the Arctic for 1961-90, the benchmark years for judging change, and problems in verifying ocean temperatures. "The world is probably a little warmer than we are measuring," he said. Arctic sea ice shrank to a record low in summer in 2007 and almost matched the low again in 2008. U.N. studies say the region may be warming twice as fast as the world average. Ships are traveling more often in the Arctic and "now there are temperature measurements coming back. But we can’t use the data because we don’t have the 1961-90 averages," he said. 

Interesting3:

Shock waves around dusty, young stars might be creating the raw materials for planets, according to new observations from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. The evidence comes in the form of tiny crystals. Spitzer detected crystals similar in make-up to quartz around young stars just beginning to form planets. The crystals, called cristobalite and tridymite, are known to reside in comets, in volcanic lava flows on Earth, and in some meteorites that land on Earth. Astronomers already knew that crystallized dust grains stick together to form larger particles, which later lump together to form planets. But they were surprised to find cristobalite and tridymite. What’s so special about these particular crystals? They require flash heating events, such as shock waves, to form. The findings suggest that the same kinds of shock waves that cause sonic booms from speeding jets are responsible for creating the stuff of planets throughout the universe. "By studying these other star systems, we can learn about the very beginnings of our own planets 4.6 billion years ago," said William Forrest of the University of Rochester, N.Y.

"Spitzer has given us a better idea of how the raw materials of planets are produced very early on."  Forrest and University of Rochester graduate student Ben Sargent led the research, to appear in the Astrophysical Journal. Planets are born out of swirling pancake-like disks of dust and gas that surround young stars. They start out as mere grains of dust swimming around in a disk of gas and dust, before lumping together to form full-fledged planets. During the early stages of planet development, the dust grains crystallize and adhere together, while the disk itself starts to settle and flatten. This occurs in the first millions of years of a star’s life. When Forrest and his colleagues used Spitzer to examine five young planet-forming disks about 400 light-years away, they detected the signature of silica crystals. Silica is made of only silicon and oxygen and is the main ingredient in glass. When melted and crystallized, it can make the large hexagonal quartz crystals often sold as mystical tokens. When heated to even higher temperatures, it can also form small crystals like those commonly found around volcanoes.

Interesting4:

A teaspoon of dirt contains an estimated 10,000 species of bacteria, but it’s only one percent of these microbial bugs — the ones that can be grown easily in a lab — that have brought us antibiotics, anticancer agents and other useful drugs. The odds favor the other 99 percent for clinical promise, too, but scientists have had little success in tapping this unknown majority for new medicines because of the difficulty of analyzing the bugs’ DNA. Now researchers at The Rockefeller University have extracted that genetic material from a lump of earth and turned it into an environmental DNA “megalibrary” that may provide access to many previously unknown organic compounds. The library has already led them to the genetic code for two potential antibiotics; the scientists also used enzymes from one set of cloned genes to produce new antibiotic derivatives as powerful as the strongest drugs we have today. The research could recharge interest in the search for new compounds in the environment that has flagged over the past decade because of lackluster results. The new findings suggest that all sorts of useful and unknown products are being manufactured by bacteria in the soil that we routinely trample underfoot. And it shows a promising way to get at them.

Interesting5:

Tiny, remote-controlled helicopters hovering above the blowholes of whales have collected snot samples that could help scientists learn which bacteria lurk in seemingly healthy cetaceans in the wild. "Up until now, all the information we have from whales comes from captive animals or animals that are dead or stranded, and that’s hardly representative of the normal population," said Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse of the Zoological Society of London. The research is focused primarily on blue whales and gray whales, with some tests on sperm whales. Early results show that blue whales and gray whales harbor fairly distinctive communities of bacteria. Acevedo-Whitehouse wanted to figure out a baseline of bacteria and other micro-organisms held by whales.

Then, by continuing to monitor the individuals, she and other scientists would be able to spot a sick whale, one with blowhole samples containing anomalous bacteria. Her new technique involves using a 3.5-foot (about a meter) remote-controlled helicopter with Petri dishes attached to the craft’s bottom. When the equipment is ready, Acevedo-Whitehouse and her colleagues work aboard a small boat, scanning the ocean for the whales’ blows, which appear as a sprinkler mist shooting from the ocean surface. The mist contains the whale’s exhalation of air, water vapor and sometimes mucus. Once the whale is spotted, an operator directs the helicopter directly above and through the mist, which sprays up onto the Petri dishes. Back at the lab, the researchers analyze DNA from the samples to identify particular micro-organisms.