December 13-14 2008
Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Saturday afternoon:
Lihue, Kauai – 74
Honolulu, Oahu – 79
Kaneohe, Oahu – 80
Kahului, Maui – 85
Hilo, Hawaii – 81
Kailua-kona – 82
Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level, and on the highest mountains…at 4 p.m. Saturday afternoon:
Kailua-kona – 81F
Port Allen, Kauai – 66F
Haleakala Crater – 46 (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 34 (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 Saturday afternoon:
13.75 Mount Waialaele, Kauai
2.63 Makaha Stream, Oahu
0.00 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.00 Kahoolawe
0.04 Mahinahina, Maui
0.46 Pali 2, Big Island
Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a weak cold front west of Kauai, which will transition to a weak trough and remain near Kauai through Monday…providing southeast to east winds. A low pressure system will develop just west of Kauai Tuesday with high pressure far to the northeast, resulting in slightly stronger southeast winds statewide toward mid-week.
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
Rainy weather on Kauai and Oahu
Photo Credit: Flikr.com
The area of low pressure, responsible for the wet weather, has moved north…although a trough extending southward is keeping rain in the forecast for the islands. This low pressure system is located about 1700+ miles north-northwest of Kauai, Saturday evening. The trough dangling southward is keeping Kauai and Oahu in the rain, which will gradually spread to Maui later in the day, with possible strong embedded thunderstorms. This rain producing trough will shift eastward, bringing its wet weather to Maui and the Big Island with time.
Kauai and Oahu will find the greatest threat of rain, with a flash flood warning over Kauai and Oahu at the time of this writing. The atmosphere remains wet and unstable, or in other words…very shower prone. The computer models want to keep a trough of low pressure near or over the island through the weekend, keeping the threat of rain in the forecast. Those same models are suggesting that the trough will remain in fairly close proximity through the middle of the new week! We may find off and on showery weather holding tight through that time frame…mixed together with partly sunny periods at times too. The latest model runs indicate the next wet weather producing trough will arrive around Wednesday coming up.
Like a conveyor belt, the rainy clouds continue to parade across the islands of Kauai and Oahu, coming up from the deeper tropics to the southwest of the state. Here’s a looping satellite image of this area of heavy showers, taking aim on Kauai and Oahu. The satellite image shows those rain producing clouds, while here is the looping radar image, which shows the heavy rains on tap for the western islands, trying to stretch over towards Maui too. This is a serious matter, as the soils on both Kauai and Oahu are both very saturated, making flooding a definite threat.
The paragraphs above lay out the inclement weather story for you, which keeps the western islands of Kauai and Oahu wet to very wet during this first half of the weekend. There hasn’t been much mention of the wet weather over Maui and the Big Island, which are outside this flooding potential for the time being. They will be more likely to see their wettest weather late Saturday night or on Sunday. The islands of Maui and the Big Island have seen a few showers arriving in places late in the day Saturday. The southeast breezes, although quite light, are carrying some volcanic haze up from the Big Island to Maui.
It’s early Saturday evening here in Kula, Maui, as I start writing this last paragraph. Saturday was another big day in terms of wet weather, with the heavy stuff hitting Kauai during the morning, next skipping over to Oahu during the afternoon hours. At one point, a severe thunderstorm flared-up, with a tornado warning for parts of Kauai! Oahu begin getting soaked again, with both of those islands now saturated, leaving the soils unable to absorb the precipitation. This promotes localized flooding, with a flash flood warning active over those two western islands in the chain. ~~~ This has been a prolonged period of off and on showers, many of which have been accompanied by heavy flooding type rainfall. As I was pointing out in one of the paragraphs above, we will remain showery into Sunday, with perhaps a bit of a break, although not totally, Monday and Tuesday. This is before the next low pressure system moves into place around mid-week, bringing the next slug of potentially heavy rains into the state. ~~~ Looking out the window of my Kula, Maui weather tower, before it gets dark, there are thick clouds, with periods of dense fog moving upcountry, on the breezy winds. I was able sneak out and put something on the bbq, but I had to wear my rain gear to do it. My wind chimes sound so sweet, as they ride along in the air currents outside. I am enjoying the moment, after being in Paia and Pukalani earlier in the day, for food shopping. I love these periods of showers, although I’m worried about the flooding aspects of this inclement weather circumstances on the island of Oahu. I’ll be back later with more news, or early Sunday morning at the latest, depending upon the severity of the island rainfall. I hope you have a great Saturday night until then! Aloha for now…Glenn.
Interesting: The world is on the brink of a massive extinction event, according to the United Nations. Rapid releases of greenhouse gas emissions are changing habitats at a rate faster than many of the world’s species can tolerate. "Indeed the world is currently facing a sixth wave of extinctions, mainly as a result of human impacts," said Achim Steiner, executive director of the U.N. Environment Program in a statement. A study earlier this year in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science said the current extinction period, known as the Holocene extinction event, may be the greatest event in the Earth’s history and the first due to human actions. Unlike previous events, however, extinctions are happening over the course of decades rather than centuries. Recent studies suggest that a quarter of the world’s species may go extinct by 2050. The UN warning accompanies an increasingly frequent round of sobering news about ecosystem failures. The latest global coral reef assessment estimates that 19 percent of the world’s coral reefs are dead.
Their major threats include warming sea-surface temperatures and expanding seawater acidification. Zooxanthellae, the tiny organisms that give coral reefs their vibrant colors, are emigrating from their hosts in massive numbers as oceans heat up, killing themselves and the coral they leave behind – a process known as coral bleaching. The report, released by the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network Wednesday at the international climate change negotiations in Pozna?, Poland, predicts that many of the remaining reefs may disappear within the next 40 years if current emission trends continue. "If nothing is done to substantially cut emissions, we could effectively lose coral reefs as we know them, with major coral extinctions," said Clive Wilkinson, the network’s coordinator, in a press release. Overfishing, pollution, and invasive species continue to be risks as well, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
Interesting2: Researchers have discovered that the ocean’s chemical makeup is less stable and more greatly affected by climate change than previously believed. Researchers report that during a time of climate change 13 million years ago the chemical makeup of the oceans changed dramatically. The researchers warn that the chemical composition of the ocean today could be similarly affected by climate changes now underway – with potentially far-reaching consequences for marine ecosystems. "As CO2 increases and weather patterns shift, the chemical composition of our rivers will change, and this will affect the oceans," says co-author Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology. "This will change the amount of calcium and other elements in ocean salts."
The research team, which included Caldeira, Elizabeth M. Griffith and Adina Paytan of the University of California, Santa Cruz, plus two other colleagues, studied core samples of deep oceanic sediment recovered from the Pacific Ocean Basin. By analyzing the calcium isotopes in grains of the mineral barite in different layers, they determined that between 13 and 8 million years ago the ocean’s calcium levels shifted dramatically. The shift corresponds to the growth of the Antarctic ice sheets during the same time interval. Because of the huge volume of water that became locked up in the ice cap, sea level also dropped. "The climate got colder, ice sheets expanded, sea level dropped, and the intensity, type, and extent of weathering on land changed," explains Griffith. "This caused changes in ocean circulation and in the amount and composition of what rivers delivered to the ocean," adds Paytan. "This in turn impacted the biology and chemistry of the ocean.
Interesting3: They come without warning, sneaking up on their victims during some of the happiest moments of their lives, and they are killing Oregonians at the highest rate since 2000. "Sneaker" waves rising unpredictably from the surf have claimed five lives on the Oregon Coast in the past two months. "We call them sneaker waves for a reason — they’re unpredictable and they sneak up on people," says Robert Smith, outdoor recreation safety coordinator for the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department, which tracks beach-related deaths. "Generally, it’s people being in the wrong place at the wrong time," Smith says. "There are several dangers existing on the Oregon Coast that people need to be aware of." Sneaker waves are sometimes called little tsunamis and they rise from the surf with zero predictability. They generally occur when two or more smaller waves fall into sync, piling atop each other to form one large wave often twice the size of others within the series of waves — called "sets."
They are a universal coastal phenomenon, occurring even during periods of little surf. But the Pacific beaches from Northern California to the Canadian border tend to generate some of the most notable of clashes with people, according to the Oregon Coast Aquarium. Since Oct. 5, five people have been caught and swept to their deaths by sneaker waves on Oregon beaches, Smith says. The most recent came Nov. 29 when 22-year-old Leafil Alforque was swept away while her fiance proposed to her at Proposal Rock in Neskowin. The couple had been standing in ankle-deep water, and a 3-foot sneaker wave knocked the diminutive Alforque down before dragging her away. It’s the most sneaker-wave fatalities since 2000, when five people also were swept to their deaths. Three of this year’s deaths occurred in two separate instances at the relatively calm-looking Sunset Bay near Coos Bay. Most years, just one or two deaths are attributed to sneaker waves, Smith says. "It’s a little bit higher this year," he says. "Some years, we have a lot of people falling victim to rip currents. Some years, it’s sneaker waves. There just really isn’t a pattern to it.
Interesting4: Another major earthquake along the same fault line that sparked the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami is likely in the next several decades — and it could unleash as much or more destruction, new research suggests. The tsunami, which killed an estimated 250,000 people, was sparked by a magnitude-9.2 earthquake along the Sunda fault off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. A major 8.4 temblor and aftershocks along a southern section of that fault called the Mentawi patch shook up the region last year. Now, analysis of coral growth patterns along the Mentawi patch suggests that the 2007 quake may have been just the first episode in an "earthquake supercycle," or set of large quakes that have occurred in the region roughly every 200 years for the past seven centuries. Sections of the Earth’s crust called tectonic plates are likely to rupture again under the Mentawi patch within several decades, possibly generating a magnitude-8.8 temblor, according to research published in this week’s Science.
"If previous cycles are a reliable guide, we can expect one or more very large west Sumatran earthquakes … within the next two decades," co-author Kerry Sieh, a professor at the California Institute of Technology’s Tectonics Observatory, said at a press conference, according to Reuters. Were such a quake to cause another tsunami, it could equal or exceed the damage of the 2004 disaster in the country’s Aceh province, which bore the brunt of the death then, write the authors, who are also from the University of Minnesota, the Indonesian Institute of Science and National Taiwan University. The scientists studied coral because — like growth rings on trees — the reefs record the history of the sea level where they grow. When tectonic plates push the ocean bed up, the sea level goes down, and coral can no longer grow vertically. It can, however, grow outward, so those cross sections reveal the pattern of tectonic movement.
Interesting5: Nearly 40 years after the U.S. flag was planted on the moon, a global rush to the final frontier has some pondering property rights out there. India, Japan and China are now circling the moon with their respective spacecraft – to be joined next year by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Then there’s the Google Lunar X Prize, a $30 million competition for the first privately funded team to send a robot to the moon, travel some 1,640 feet (500 meters) and transmit video, images and data back to Earth. The legal profession sees a brief in the making. Laws tend to build on precedent. Since there’s little precedent for lunar laws, some look to the sea for suggestions. That is, the use of ocean floor minerals beyond the limits of national jurisdiction. Such valuable resources are designated by some as a Common Heritage of mankind, not subject to national appropriation.
Could the Common Heritage concept work as the basis for a Moon Treaty? Virgiliu Pop is a research specialist at the Romanian Space Agency. He has for years been keeping a legal eye on the area of space property rights, and his new book, "Who Owns the Moon? – Extraterrestrial Aspects of Land and Mineral Resources Ownership" (Springer, 2008) was published this month. Pop has been delving into what has shaped the law of extraterrestrial real estate, and the norms which express this law. And in his view, the norms and rules regarding property rights in the celestial realm are rather limited, even failing to define basic concepts such as what is a celestial body.
Interesting6: Panamanian termites have the fastest draw not only in the West, but in the whole world: They can clamp their jaws down on an invader at nearly 157 mph (70 meters per second), killing their enemy with a single blow. Researchers studying the termites needed a high speed video camera running at 40,000 frames per second to capture a mandible strike in action. (Mandible is the biological word for jaw or biting mouthpart.) "Many insects move much faster than a human eye can see, so we knew that we needed high speed cameras to capture their behavior, but we weren’t expecting anything this fast," said study team member Marc Seid, a postdoctoral researcher at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. The Panamanian termite’s chomp-down is the fastest "mandible strike" recorded. The termites have to employ such a speedy strike to defend themselves, because their small size makes it harder to generate enough force to inflict damage on a foe.
"To create a large impact force with a light object you need to reach very high velocities before impact," said study team member Jeremy Niven, also a postdoctoral researcher at STRI. Because a termite soldier faces down enemies inside a narrow tunnel and has little room to parry and little time to waste, this death blow proves to be incredibly efficient, though it works only over short distances. The force for the blow is stored by deforming the jaws, which are held pressed against one another until the strike is triggered. This strategy of storing up energy from the muscles to produce fast movements also is employed by locusts, trap-jaw ants and froghoppers. "The termites need to store energy to generate enough destructive force. They appear to store the energy in their mandibles but we still don’t know how they do this — that’s the next question," Niven said.
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