June 21-22, 2010
Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across
Lihue, Kauai – 83
Honolulu, Oahu – 86
Kaneohe, Oahu – 83
Kaunakakai, Molokai – 83
Kahului, Maui – 86
Hilo, Hawaii – 80
Kailua-kona – 83
Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level around
Port Allen, Kauai – 84
Molokai AP – 77
Haleakala Crater – 57 (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 46 (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:
0.46 Mount Waialaele, Kauai
0.04 Manoa Valley, Oahu
0.02 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.00 Kahoolawe
0.40 West Wailuaiki, Maui
1.19 Kawainui Stream, Big Island
Marine Winds – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a large 1029 millibar high pressure system far to the northeast of the islands. This will keep moderately strong trade winds blowing through Wednesday…locally stronger and gusty during the afternoons.
Satellite and Radar Images: To view the cloud conditions we have here in Hawaii, please use the following satellite links, starting off with this Infrared Satellite Image of the islands to see all the clouds around
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.
Tropical Cyclone activity in the eastern and central Pacific – Here’s the latest weather information coming out of the National Hurricane Center, covering the eastern north Pacific. You can find the latest tropical cyclone information for the central north Pacific (where Hawaii is located) by clicking on this link to the Central Pacific Hurricane Center. Here’s a tracking map covering both the eastern and central Pacific Ocean. A satellite image, which shows the entire ocean area between Hawaii and the Mexican coast…can be found here. Of course, as we know, our hurricane season won’t begin again until June 1st here in the central Pacific.
Aloha Paragraphs
Trade wind weather conditions into Tuesday
Trade winds will continue, strengthening some Tuesday through Thursday…then backing off Friday into the weekend. Small craft wind advisories are now active in those windiest areas across the entire state Monday night…and will likely remain over those areas through Thursday. This latest weather map shows a moderately strong 1029 millibar high pressure system to the northeast of the Hawaiian Islands…the source of our winds now. The forecast models point out a reasonably good chance of considerably lighter winds this weekend, which may remain in place into early next well as well.
The windward sides will see a few showers…most notably during the night and early morning hours. As this IR satellite image shows, there are lots of scattered clouds around the islands…most of which are offshore from the islands as we push into the night. This looping radar image shows scattered showers moving through the state…on the easterly trade winds. This larger view of the central Pacific shows an increase in thunderstorm activity far to the southwest of the islands. Otherwise, we’ll find lots of daytime sunshine, and good weather at our local beaches for the time being.
It’s Monday evening as I begin writing this last section of today’s narrative update. We’ll find fairly normal weather conditions here in the islands this week, at least through Thursday. As far as rainfall goes, there will be some showers, although not all that many most of the time. There could be an increase in windward showers perhaps around Friday night into Saturday…as a trough of low pressure makes our overlying atmosphere more shower prone then.
~~~ The eastern Pacific Ocean has just one active tropical cyclone now, as former Blas has been given its final advisory. This satellite image shows strengthening hurricane Celia
offshore from the Mexican coast. Celia continues to head generally towards the west, as shown on this graphical track map. The good news is that this tropical cyclone, which will soon be referred to as a major hurricane, will have no bearing on the Hawaiian Islands…here in the central Pacific through at least the next week, if any at all. There may be a chance that we could get some of the leftover showers from Celia later next week.
~~~ Here in Kihei, Maui this evening it’s generally clear to partly cloudy down near the beaches, and cloudy up the slopes of the Haleakala Crater. The trade winds are blowing as usual. As a matter of fact, starting Tuesday, there will be an active fire weather watch in effect across all of our south and west facing leeward coasts and slopes. This is a result of the expected gusty winds, which will become rather strong, and low humidity levels. Other than that, and the somewhat elevated surf along some of our south and west facing beaches, things will remain fairly normal. I’ll be back early Tuesday morning with your next new weather narrative. I hope you have a good Monday night until then! Aloha for now…Glenn
Extra: In one day, a full grown Oak tree expels 7 tons of water through its leaves.
Interesting: In the summer of 2002, a week of heavy rains in Central Texas caused Canyon Lake — the reservoir of the Canyon Dam — to flood over its spillway and down the Guadalupe River Valley in a planned diversion to save the dam from catastrophic failure. The flood, which continued for six weeks, stripped the valley of mesquite, oak trees, and soil; destroyed a bridge; and plucked meter-wide boulders from the ground. And, in a remarkable demonstration of the power of raging waters, the flood excavated a 2.2-kilometer-long, 7-meter-deep canyon in the bedrock.
According to a new analysis of the flood and its aftermath — performed by Michael Lamb, assistant professor of geology at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and Mark Fonstad of Texas State University — the canyon formed in just three days. A paper about the research appears in the June 20 advance online edition of the journal Nature Geoscience.
Our traditional view of deep river canyons, such as the Grand Canyon, is that they are carved slowly, as the regular flow and occasionally moderate rushing of rivers erodes rock over periods of millions of years. Such is not always the case, however. "We know that some big canyons have been cut by large catastrophic flood events during Earth’s history," Lamb says.
Unfortunately, these catastrophic megafloods — which also may have chiseled out spectacular canyons on Mars — generally leave few telltale signs to distinguish them from slower events. "There are very few modern examples of megafloods," Lamb says, "and these events are not normally witnessed, so the process by which such erosion happens is not well understood."
Nevertheless, he adds, "the evidence that is left behind, like boulders and streamlined sediment islands, suggests the presence of fast water" — although it reveals nothing about the time frame over which the water flowed. This is why the Canyon Lake flood is so significant. "Here, we know that all of the erosion occurred during the flood," Lamb says.
"Flood waters flowed for several weeks, but the highest discharge — during which the bulk of the erosion took place — was over a period of just three days." Lamb and Fonstad reached this conclusion using aerial photographs of the region taken both before and after the flood, along with field measurements of the topography of the region and measurements of the flood discharge.
Then they applied an empirical model of the sediment-carrying capacity of the flood — that is, the amount of soil, rocks, boulders, and other debris carried by the flood to produce the canyon. The analysis revealed that the rate of the canyon erosion was so rapid that it was limited only by the amount of sediment the floodwaters could carry. This is in contrast to models normally applied to rivers where the erosion is limited by the rate at which the underlying rock breaks and is abraded.
The researchers argue that the rate of erosion was rapid because the flood was able to pop out and cart away massive boulders (a process called "plucking") — producing several 10- to 12-meter-high waterfalls that propagated upstream toward the dam, along with channels and terraces. The flood was able to pluck these boulders because the bedrock below the soil surface of the valley was already fractured and broken.
The abrasion of rock by sediment-loaded waters — while less significant in terms of the overall formation of the canyon — produced other features, like sculpted walls, plunge pools at the bases of the waterfalls, and teardrop-shaped sediment islands. The sediment islands are particularly significant, Lamb says, because "these are features we see on Earth and on Mars in areas where we think large flow events have occurred.
It’s nice that here we’re seeing some of the same features that we’ve interpreted elsewhere as evidence of large flow events." The results, Lamb says, offer useful insight into ancient megafloods, both on Earth and on Mars, and the deep canyons they left behind. "We’re trying to build models of erosion rates so we can go to places like Mars and make quantitative reconstructions of how much water was there, how long it lasted, and how quickly it moved," Lamb says. In addition, he says, "this is one of a few places where models for canyon formation can be tested because we know the flood conditions under which this canyon formed."
Interesting2: Scientists have found that the ocean temperature at Earth’s polar extremes has a significant impact thousands of miles away at the equator. Newcastle University’s Dr Erin McClymont is part of an international team of researchers who have published research in Science June 18, 2010 demonstrating a close link between the changes in the subpolar climate and the development of the modern tropical Pacific climate around two million years ago.
The team believes this solves another piece of the puzzle concerning oceanic behavior and its influence on climate. This research, led by the Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals in Barcelona, studied the Northern Pacific and Southern Atlantic sea-surface temperatures from the Pliocene Era (3.65 million years ago) to the present day. Data obtained during the reconstruction indicates that the regions close to the poles of both oceans have played a fundamental role in the way the tropical climate has evolved.
The cooling and expansion of polar waters between 1.8 and 1.2 million years ago increased the temperature difference between the equator and the poles. This intensified atmospheric circulation and helped to develop the modern day ‘cold tongue’ in the east Pacific. Created by a shallow thermocline — the layer of ocean water in which temperatures fall rapidly — the cold tongue brings cold, deep waters to the surface in the east tropical Pacific.
Under the warmer climate of the Pliocene, the thermocline was deeper and the cold tongue was much smaller, creating a situation more like the ‘El Niño’ events that hit the Pacific every three to five years. "Our results show that the polar oceans play a key role in the global climate, and that one outcome of a rise in global temperature could be an increase in the depth of the thermocline and contraction of the cold tongue in the eastern Pacific," said Dr McClymont.
"The high-latitudes are currently experiencing large climate changes, and our data show that this could impact on tropical climates as we saw in the Pliocene." The study of Pliocene climate has been the subject of intense research as this era represents the most recent climatic period in Earth’s history when average temperatures were significantly higher than today over a sustained period. As a result, the Pliocene is thought to be the closest predictor of Earth’s climate in the future.
Interesting3: The secret life of water just got weirder. For years water has been known to exist in 15 phases — not just the merry threesome of solid, liquid and gas from grade school science. Now, University of Utah chemists have confirmed the coexistence of ice and liquid after water crystallizes at very low temperatures. They describe their work in the June 21 issue of the Journal of Chemical Physics, which is published by the American Institute of Physics (AIP).
It takes more than a swizzle stick and a cocktail shaker to do this kind of ice research. It takes a temperature of 180 K, an extremely cold temperature typical of the upper atmosphere called the "no-man’s land" of water because of the curious blurring of two water phases — liquid and ice — that occurs there. "This blurring is what’s interesting," says Valeria Molinero, who led the research.
"Our findings show that what goes on there is important to the behavior of water and to the formation of clouds." Molinero and graduate student Emily Moore discovered that at 180 K rapid ice crystallization makes it difficult to follow the process. Because the molecules move too quickly to observe directly in the lab, their investigation used computer simulations.
By targeting this critical temperature zone, their work might be important for understanding cloud formations that regulate global radiation and hence climate change. While this is a boon for understanding supercooled water and its role in cloud formation, it’s a breakthrough for those dreaming of a No Man’s Land Physics Fun Park. One day, they just might play hockey while swimming.
Interesting4: The millions upon millions of gallons of oil hemorrhaging into the Gulf of Mexico every day is a crude reminder of the many ways humans are fouling the planet. As forests are cleared, cities and suburbs paved and expanded, as the air and sea warm and become increasingly polluted with cancer-causing chemicals and garbage, and with species dropping like flies, the planet’s health is being challenged in ways that have not occurred in its entire 4.5-billion-year existence.
Can Earth survive? The simple answer is a resounding "yes." When humans are gone, as the fossil record suggests will happen eventually, Earth will clean itself up and take on yet another new look,just as it has done many times in the past. In many ways, Earth’s existence has been tested far more dramatically in the past than by anything humans have thrown at it. From its origins as a giant lava ball to an epoch that engulfed the entire planet in ice a mile deep, this planet has seen it all. Our planet was even purple for awhile, scientists say.
"As far as the solid Earth, I doubt if it cares much about life on Earth," said Richard Carlson, a geochemist at the CarnegieInstitution of Washington in D.C. "So volcanoes, plate tectonics,earthquakes, etc. likely would go on as before." The Earth may care little, but humans certainly have reason to figure out how to better survive the planet’s changes, whether natural or caused by people.
Some like it hot
Earth is thought to have formed from protoplanetary bodies colliding during the chaotic early days of the solar system. Barely 30 million to 50 million years later, a catastrophic smashup took place between the young planet and a smaller Mars-sized object, reshaping the world dramatically around 4.5 billion years ago. That early violence helped spawn the moon. More giant impacts between 4.1 billion and 3.9 billion years ago may have shaped the continents and possibly even re-melted the solidifying planetary crust, scientists say.
More recently, super-volcanoes that dwarf anything seen in recorded history wreaked additional havoc. One series of eruptions around 65 million years ago spewed lava across an area more than twice the size of Texas. But the world has not ended in fire just yet, and it even survived a "snowball Earth" period between 710 million and 640 million years ago that put ordinary ice ages to shame. Geologists have found evidence that sea ice and glaciers reached all the way to the equator during that period.
Despite all the upheaval, life managed to not only survive but thrive. A thick organic haze of methane and nitrogen may have helped out by keeping the planet unfrozen early on, scientists suggest. The rise of life on Earth may not have shaken things up in a geological sense, but it did give a makeover to the planet’s chemistry. Now humans represent the latest to alter the balance of life and chemistry on the planet during our relatively short existence.
Turn and face the strain
Species are going extinct at a rate between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than the expected natural extinction rate based on the fossil record, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, which is charged with officially declaring endangered or extinct species.
Forests that once covered continents such as Europe now look like shadows of their former selves after hundreds of years of land clearing. Deforestation has begun to slow in the last decade, but an area of forest the size of Vermont and New Hampshire combined is still destroyed each year, said a recent report by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.
All major fisheries have collapsed due to overfishing, and rising carbon dioxide levels raise the specter of moremass extinction among marine life due to ocean acidification – not unlike what has happened previously during the Earth’s history. Humans have even changed the atmosphere, as in the case of chlorofluorocarbons(CFCs) used as refrigerants. The ozone-destroying chemicals could have created a world where a permanent ozone layer hole yawned above Antarctica and people sunburned within minutes, if not for the Montreal Protocol that banned CFCs in 1989.
Such changes may have proved ruinous for humans, but Earth itself would have shrugged them off. "If these [major chemical changes in the atmosphere] were big enough to kill off humanity, the atmosphere likely would recover pretty quickly, at least on geologic time scales." Similarly, the Earth has stoically endured climate change far beyond anything experienced by humans. But history shows that human civilization remains vulnerable to even minor shifts in climate patterns.
For instance, a cooler Pacific Ocean has been connected with drier climate and drought conditions that led to famines in Medieval Europe, and perhaps the disappearance of cliff-dwelling natives of the American West. Now global warming driven by greenhouse gases may lead to even wilder climate fluctuations in different parts of the world.
Rates of increasing carbon dioxide are approximately 100 times greater than most changes previously seen during geologic time, according to researchers on the Ocean Carbon & Biogeochemistry website. Whether or not humans choose to deal with greenhouse gases, Earth’s history shows that they inevitably face a running battle with climate change. Species that couldn’t adapt in the past have died, and odds are that humanity’s number will be up at some point.
The things we leave behind
"There will definitely be minute traces of us around, but I suspect most of the stuff that says we were here will be buried by geology," said Alan Weisman, a journalist and author of the book "The World Without Us" (Thomas Dunne Books, 2007). Many of humanity’s most visible achievements would vanish quickly. Buildings would crumble and decay within just 10,000 to 15,000 years. A bronze bust could survive for millions of years, Weisman said, even if it toppled and ended up buried, as would be likely.
Some more lasting effects on the Earth might come from the chemicals that would leak from their tanks within decades, or nano-particles being engineered every day inside labs. "We’ve created some chemical molecules that nothing in nature knows how to break down yet," Weisman pointed out. "Some, nature will figure out. Microbes will figure out how to do plastic."
A more deadly legacy for life after humans comes from more than 440 nuclear power plants. Overheating would cause about half to burn and the rest to suffer meltdowns, releasing radioactivity into the air and nearby water. Unattended refineries and chemical plants could also start burning and in turn releasing chemicals. The equivalent of hundreds of Chernobyl disasters "would probably start forcing evolution in pretty dramatic ways," Weisman said.
Still, the Earth had already experienced nuclear fission almost 2 billion years ago. Several uranium deposits at Oklo in the Republic of Gabon, a southwestern region of Africa, showed evidence of having operated as natural nuclear reactors for several hundred thousand years.
Earth also has experience dealing with oil spills, given along history of natural oil seepage in places such as the Gulf of Mexico. Wild microbes that have evolved to break down oil no doubt found an unusually bountiful feast in recent months because of the Gulf oil gusher from the BP oil rig disaster. That "horrifying" event may register as just a blip on the Earth’s radar. But it still seems like a very long-term mess for the humans who have to live with it, Weisman noted. "The oil sucks," Weisman said. "You can quote me on that."
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Gordon Deppe Says:
This is a great conversation all of you got happening. I like the combination of good and exact information coupled with a few intellectual ideas. It’s actually nice to at last find great content where I believe I could trust the text and also admire the people whom publish it. Because of the web garbage nowadays I continually love uncovering some real presences on the net. Thanks for posting and keep writing, please!!~~~Thanks Gordon! Aloha, Glenn
Eric Phillips Says:
Glenn,
Thanks for the awesome web site and we miss your TV show in the AM.
Eric from Island Paddler~~~Thanks Eric, you’re very welcome! Aloha, Glenn