December 15-16 2008
Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Monday afternoon:
Lihue, Kauai – 76
Honolulu, Oahu – 81
Kaneohe, Oahu – 80
Kahului, Maui – 86
Hilo, Hawaii – 78
Kailua-kona – 82
Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level, and on the highest mountains…at 4 p.m. Monday afternoon:
Kahului, Maui – 82F
Lihue, Kauai – 72F
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 Monday afternoon:
0.19 Mount Waialaele, Kauai
1.05 Schofield Barracks, Oahu
0.12 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.05 Kahoolawe
1.03 Kaupo Gap, Maui
1.69 Pali 2, Big Island
Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a low pressure system developing to the west of Hawaii, over the offshore waters…and high pressure system located well to the northeast, which will keep winds near the islands mainly from the southeast through Saturday.
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
Some clouds, showers…and haze
Photo Credit: Flikr.com
A trough of low pressure to the west of Kauai, will keep our atmosphere somewhat shower prone, especially on Kauai and the Big Island for the time being. The latest weather maps show this trough being pushed westward, west of Kauai Monday night. This pushing motion is being caused by generally light southeast breezes…although they are locally gusty near the Big Island. Southeast winds is carrying volcanic haze to the other islands. Our winds will become more generally southeast to even south or southwest in a few days, as a new developing low and trough form over the ocean…to the west of Kauai. We may begin to see the trade winds by the upcoming weekend.
The trough to the west of Kauai, and where the southeast breezes meet land…will be where the most showers fall into Tuesday. A few heavy showers have moved across Kauai late in the day Monday. At the same time, we find showery clouds moving along in the SE breezes, bringing moisture to the Big Island too. The showers on the southeast side of the Big Island were quite generous Monday morning. The next several days will find a mixed bag, with clouds, some sun, and some showers. Looking a bit further ahead, the next low pressure system to the west, may or may not bring showers or rain…back into the forecast later this week on Kauai.
It’s early Monday evening here in Kihei, Maui, as I start writing this last paragraph. Looking at this looping satellite image, we see clouds, much of which are the high cirrus variety, streaking across island skies from the west and southwest of the islands. Meanwhile, checking out this looping radar image, we see whatever showers that are falling, being carried along by the generally southeast winds. The breezes down near the Big Island seem to be coming in from the southeast…along the Kau coast. Our winds will remain from the southeast direction statewide, which is bringing up lots of volcanic haze over the Aloha state. ~~~ The computer models haven’t quite decided where the rains will be located later this week. One possibility is to the west of Kauai, over the ocean…or over Niihau and Kauai? We will know better over the next day or two. I’d say, with all things considered, and the still soggy ground on both Oahu and Kauai…that keeping more heavy rains away from those two western islands would be a favorable choice! ~~~ Looking at that satellite image just above, we see a ton of clouds sweeping-up over the state, closest to the island of Kauai now…although all the islands are getting their fair share…more than that perhaps! If you look to the west, you will see the first signs of that newly developing low pressure system. Look for the counterclockwise rotating area to the left of that major swath of clouds. Looking at the radar loop, most of the showers, at least at the time of this writing, are located over the ocean to the west of Kauai…although some showers are taking aim on the garden isle of Kauai as well. ~~~ Speaking of clouds, looking out the window here in Kihei, before I take the drive upcountry to Kula, it is totally cloudy, no sunshine or blue skies anywhere. It’s hazy outside too. I’ll come back online when I get home if I run into showers, otherwise, I’ll catch up with you very early Tuesday morning. Aloha for now…Glenn.
Interesting: Researchers watching the loss of ice flowing out from the giant island of Greenland say that the amount of ice lost this summer is nearly three times what was lost one year ago. The loss of floating ice in 2008 pouring from Greenland’s glaciers would cover an area twice the size of Manhattan Island in the U.S., they said. Jason Box, an associate professor of geography at Ohio State, said that the loss of ice since the year 2000 is 355.4 square miles, or more than 10 times the size of Manhattan. "We now know that the climate doesn’t have to warm any more for Greenland to continue losing ice," Box said.
"It has probably passed the point where it could maintain the mass of ice that we remember. "But that doesn’t mean that Greenland’s ice will all disappear. It’s likely that it will probably adjust to a new ‘equilibrium’ but before it reaches the equilibrium, it will shed a lot more ice. "Greenland is de-glaciating and actually has been doing so for most of the past half-century." Box, a researcher with Ohio State’s Byrd Polar Research Center, along with graduate students Russell Benson and David Decker, presented their findings at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.
Interesting2: Researchers in Nevada are reporting that waste coffee grounds can provide a cheap, abundant, and environmentally friendly source of biodiesel fuel for powering cars and trucks. In the new study, Mano Misra, Susanta Mohapatra, and Narasimharao Kondamudi note that the major barrier to wider use of biodiesel fuel is lack of a low-cost, high quality source, or feedstock, for producing that new energy source. Spent coffee grounds contain between 11 and 20 percent oil by weight. That’s about as much as traditional biodiesel feedstocks such as rapeseed, palm, and soybean oil. Growers produce more than 16 billion pounds of coffee around the world each year. The used or "spent" grounds remaining from production of espresso, cappuccino, and plain old-fashioned cups of java, often wind up in the trash or find use as soil conditioner.
The scientists estimated, however, that spent coffee grounds can potentially add 340 million gallons of biodiesel to the world’s fuel supply. To verify it, the scientists collected spent coffee grounds from a multinational coffeehouse chain and separated the oil. They then used an inexpensive process to convert 100 percent of the oil into biodiesel. The resulting coffee-based fuel — which actually smells like java — had a major advantage in being more stable than traditional biodiesel due to coffee’s high antioxidant content, the researchers say. Solids left over from the conversion can be converted to ethanol or used as compost, the report notes. The scientists estimate that the process could make a profit of more than $8 million a year in the U.S. alone. They plan to develop a small pilot plant to produce and test the experimental fuel within the next six to eight months.
Interesting3: Massive swarms of stinging jellyfish and jellyfish-like animals are transforming many world-class fisheries and tourist destinations into veritable jellytoriums that are intermittently jammed with pulsating, gelatinous creatures. Areas that are currently particularly hard-hit by these squishy animals include Hawaii, the Gulf of Mexico, the east coast of the U.S., the Bering Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, Australia, the Black Sea and other European seas, the Sea of Japan, the North Sea and Namibia. Massive jellyfish swarms–some of which cover hundreds of square miles–have caused injuries and even occasional deaths to water enthusiasts, and have caused serious damage to fisheries, fish farms, marine mines, desalination plants, ships and nuclear power plants.
Since the 1980s, jellyfish swarms have cost the world’s fishing and tourism industries alone hundreds of millions of dollars and perhaps even billions of dollars. From large swarms of potentially deadly, peanut-sized jellyfish in Australia to swarms of hundreds of millions of refrigerator-sized jellyfish in the Sea of Japan, suspicion is growing that population explosions of jellyfish are being generated by human activities. Human activities that have been suggested by media reports and scientists as possible causes of some jellyfish swarms include pollution, climate change, introductions of non-native species, overfishing and the presence of artificial structures, such as oil and gas rigs. But which of these human activities, if any of them, are really to blame?
Interesting4: Polar bears could survive extinction despite many starving to death in coming years, according to scientists and other observers who have discovered that some of the bears have found a new food source — goose and duck eggs. The eggs could be coming in part from a rebounding goose population in the Hudson Bay area, feeding polar bears whose icy habitat in the Arctic is melting, one new study finds. In recent years, much of the sea ice that polar bears use as a hunting platform for seal meals has melted, forcing some bears — particularly young males — farther north or onto land, where they are not as adept at hunting. When stuck on land for months, a polar bear typically is forced to survive on its own fat reserves. The bears were listed earlier this year as a threatened species under the U.S. Endangered Species Act as populations have declined. Meanwhile, snow geese are thriving near the western Hudson Bay, and researchers say there are in fact too many of them. Their eggs can be a good food source, researchers report in the online version of the journal Polar Biology. The geese nest on tundra that some bears have retreated to.
"Over 40 years, six subadult male bears were seen among snow goose nests, and four of them were sighted after the year 2000," says Robert Rockwell, an ornithologist at the American Museum of Natural History and a biology professor at City University of New York’s City College. "I’ve seen a subadult male eat eider duck eggs whole or press its nose against the shell, break it, and eat the contents." Ice is melting, on average, 0.72 days earlier each year in the region studied. Snow geese are hatching eggs about 0.16 days sooner each year, according to Rockwell and his graduate student Linda Gormezano. Current trends indicate that the arrival of polar bears will overlap the mean hatching period in 3.6 years, and egg consumption could become a routine, reliable option, the researcher concluded in a statement released today. A polar bear, the largest land carnivore, would need to consume the eggs of 43 nests to replace the energy gained from the average day of hunting seals, but Rockwell and his colleagues figure that while many polar bears may starve in coming years, the resourceful animals just might survive extinction.
Interesting5: A clam dredged from Icelandic waters had lived for 400 years – is this the longest-lived animal known to science? Can you imagine living for four centuries? A team of scientists from Bangor University’s School of Ocean Sciences believe they have found an animal which did just that, a quahog clam, Arctica islandica, which was living and growing on the seabed in the cold waters off the north coast of Iceland for around 400 years. When this animal was a juvenile, King James I replaced Queen Elizabeth I as English monarch, Shakespeare was writing his greatest plays Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth and Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for espousing the view that the Sun rather than the Earth was the centre of the universe. According to the Guinness Book of Records, the existing record for the longest-lived animal belongs to a 220 year old Arctica clam collected in 1982 from American waters. Unofficially, the record belongs to a 374 year old Icelandic clam which was found in a museum. Both these records appear to have been eclipsed by the latest specimen, whose age, between 405 and 410 years, has been assessed by counting the annual growth lines in the shell.
Interesting6: The tiny tangled threads of the world’s oldest spider web have been found encased in a prehistoric piece of amber, a British scientist said Monday. Oxford University paleobiologist Martin Brasier said the 140-million-year-old webbing provides evidence that arachnids had been ensnaring their prey in silky nets since the dinosaur age. He also said the strands were linked to each other in the roughly circular pattern familiar to gardeners the world over. "You can match the details of the spider’s web with the spider’s web in my garden," Brasier said. The web was found in a small piece of amber picked up by an amateur fossil-hunter scouring the beaches on England’s south coast about two years ago, Brasier said. A microscope revealed the existence of tiny threads about 1 millimeter (1/20th of an inch) long amid bits of burnt sap and fossilized vegetable matter.
While not as dramatic as a fully preserved net of spider silk, the minuscule strands, show that spiders had been spinning circle-shaped webs well into prehistory, according to Simon Braddy, a University of Bristol paleobiologist uninvolved with the find. "It’s not a striking, perfect web," Braddy said. "(But) this seems to confirm that spiders were building orb webs back in the early Cretaceous" — the geological term for the period of time between 145.5 and 65.5 million years ago when dinosaurs and small mammals shared the earth. Spider experts believe that webs were developed even earlier, but the delicate gossamer threads rarely leave any trace. Amber, or fossilized tree resin, can occasionally conserve bits of web — an earlier find in Lebanon was dated to 130 million years ago, according to Brasier.
Interesting7: Scientists have found even more evidence that volcanism, not a space rock, may be the culprit behind the dinosaurs’ demise. The first well-supported theory for what wiped out all large dinosaurs involved a space rock that created the Chicxulub crater in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. But climate change and volcanism have been suggested in recent decades, too. A set of new studies further shifts the blame away from the impact and toward volcanism, a position that geologist Gerta Keller of Princeton University has taken in recent years. Keller and others now say more about the life-extinguishing work of a massive series of sulfur dioxide-spewing volcanic eruptions that occurred in what is now India at the time of the dinosaur-destroying K-T mass extinction (the shorthand given to the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction). The asteroid-impact "theory is now facing perhaps it’s most serious challenge from the Deccan volcanism and perhaps the Chicxulub impact itself," Keller said today during a news conference at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Society in San Francisco. The K-T extinction ended the dinosaurs’ reign on Earth and caused the extinction of 70 percent of life on the planet at the time.
Interesting8: If they are too unhealthy for US consumers to stomach, should fast food chains be allowed to continue serving up products laden with harmful fats in Asia? That is the question raised by the closure of the Krispy Kreme Doughnuts franchise in Hong Kong and the discovery that it was keeping the controversial ingredient, trans-fats, in Asian doughnuts while banning them in the US. Trans-fats are found in some deep-fried foods and processed foods made with margarine or shortening. In January Krispy Kreme, the US’s second-largest doughnut chain after market leader Dunkin’ Donuts, announced a "zero trans-fats" policy for its US restaurants. Four months later, a consumer watchdog investigation found that doughnuts sold in the nine Krispy Kreme Doughnuts outlets in Hong Kong still contained high levels of trans-fats.
The report in May by the Hong Kong Consumer Council found that while doughnuts sold in the US may be trans-fats free, a single Krispy Kreme doughnut in Hong Kong contained 2.2 grams of trans-fats, in excess of the World Health Organisation’s recommended daily intake. Trans-fats, also known as hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated fats, have been used in food processing for the last 40 years because they make the process cheaper and preserve food longer. Studies have now identified those fats as a cause of coronary heart disease and other conditions, and they have been banned in Denmark, Canada and New York City. Many foods served in Asia still contain trans-fats and the Hong Kong Consumer Council report identified a number of local cake shops and other food outlets still using them.
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