Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs / August 1-2, 2010

August 1-2, 2010

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

Lihue, Kauai –  84
Honolulu, Oahu –  85
Kaneohe, Oahu –  82
Kaunakakai, Molokai – 81
Kahului, Maui – 86
Hilo, Hawaii –   82
Kailua-kona –   82

Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level – and on the highest mountain tops too…as of 3pm Sunday afternoon:

Barking Sands, Kauai – 86
Molokai airport – 77 

Haleakala Crater –    59 (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 50 (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 Sunday afternoon: 

0.89 Mount Waialeale, Kauai  
0.49 Moanalua RG, Oahu
0.04 Molokai 
0.00 Lanai
0.00 Kahoolawe
0.72 Puu Kukui, Maui
1.31 Kawainui Stream, Big Island

Marine Winds – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a 1030 millibar high pressure system to the northeast of the islands. Our local trade winds will remain active Monday and Tuesday.

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 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. Finally, here’s a Looping IR satellite image, making viewable the clouds around the islands 24 hours a day. 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.

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

 
       A lava rock coast…rather than a sandy one
 
    

 

 

Our trade winds will continue in those exposed areas…gradually decreasing in strength as we get into the new work work ahead.  Small craft advisories remain in force over those windiest areas around the Hawaiian Islands. This weather map shows a large 1030 millibar high pressure system positioned far to the northeast of the islands…the source of our quick paced trade wind flow. This high pressure cell stretches all the way from Alaska…down into the tropics south of our islands.

Our weather will remain on the dry side, although there will be passing shower activity along our windward sides at times.  Satellite imagery shows partly cloudy conditions to the east and northeast of the islands…as we see on this IR satellite image. Using this same satellite image we see thunderstorm activity down to the southwest and southeast, in the deeper tropics.

>>> The satellite image above shows an area of the atmosphere that is being referred to as disturbed. The NWS is giving this area of gathering thunderstorms a 30% chance of developing into a tropical depression…as shown on this satellite image. Here’s what the forecast models are showing on this area being called Invest 92. We see two camps, one bunch that takes it south of the islands…with one outlier bringing it closer. Looking at this larger satellite image we see another area of thunderstorms to the southwest.

It’s Sunday as I begin writing this last section of today’s narrative update.  As noted above, our trade winds remain quite breezy on this first day of August, and then are expected to slip down a little as we move into the new week…although most folks won’t notice the difference. To get an idea how strong the trade winds are near sea level, in gusts…these were the highest as of early Sunday evening, on each of the islands:

Kauai –   35 mph
Oahu –    42
Molokai – 30
Kahoolawe – 31
Lanai – 16 
Maui – 37
Big Island – 40

~~~ Those wind gusts are stronger than usual, especially those that are just above the 40 mph mark.

~~~ It’s early Sunday evening here in Kula, Maui, with at least partly cloudy skies, and an air temperature of 67.3F degrees at 645pm. It’s a bit breezy up here on the west slope of the Haleakala Crater, as my wind chimes are making soft music for a change. I see clouds hugging the slopes over on the windward sides, with perhaps a few light showers falling locally. In the leeward areas, down near the beaches in Kihei and Lahaina, there are quite a few clouds as well. I’m still eye balling that area of disturbed weather down to our southeast, which started off with a 40% chance of developing into something, then dropped to 20% this morning, and now up to 30% later in the day. There’s more information about that in one of the paragraphs above. Looking at the Atlantic Ocean, there’s an area over there that’s being given a 90% chance of developing, as shown here. The forecast models are showing this about it, while here’s a satellite image. ~~~ I’ll be back early Monday morning with your next new weather narrative, I hope you have a great Sunday night until then! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Extra: cool super slow motion skateboarding youtube video

Extra2: cool super slow motion surfing youtube video

Extra3: cool super slow motion Lightning

Interesting: Researchers have identified rocks that they say could contain the fossilized remains of life on early Mars. The team made their discovery in the ancient rocks of Nili Fossae. Their work has revealed that this trench on Mars is a "dead ringer" for a region in Australia where some of the earliest evidence of life on Earth has been buried and preserved in mineral form.

They report the findings in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters. The team, led by a scientist from the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (Seti) in California, believes that the same "hydrothermal" processes that preserved these markers of life on Earth could have taken place on Mars at Nili Fossae.

The rocks there are up to four billion years old, which means they have been around for three-quarters of the history of Mars. When, in 2008, scientists first discovered carbonate in those rocks the Mars science community reacted with great excitement; carbonate had long been sought as definitive evidence that the Red planet was habitable – that life could have existed there.

Carbonate is what life – or at least the mineral portion of a living organism – turns into, in many cases, when it is buried. The white cliffs of Dover, for example, are white because they contain limestone, or calcium carbonate. The mineral comes from the fossilized remains, shells and bones and provides a way to investigate the ancient life that existed on early Earth.

In this new research, scientists have taken the identification of carbonate on Mars a step further. Adrian Brown from the Seti Institute, who led the research, used an instrument aboard Nasa’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter called Crism to study the Nilae Fossae rocks with infrared light. Then he and his team used exactly the same technique to study rocks in an area in north-west Australia called the Pilbara.

"The Pilbara is very cool," Dr Brown told BBC News. "It’s part of the Earth that has managed to stay at the surface for around 3.5 billion years – so about three quarters of the history of the Earth." "It allows us a little window into what was happening on the Earth at its very early stages." And all those billions of years ago, scientists believe that microbes formed some distinctive features in the Pilbara rocks – features called "stromatolites" that can be seen and studied today.

"Life made these features. We can tell that by the fact that only life could make those shapes; no geological process could." This latest study has revealed that the rocks at Nili Fossae are very similar to the Pilbara rocks – in terms of the minerals they contain. And Dr Brown and his colleagues believe that this shows that the remnants of life on early Mars could be buried at this site.

"If there was enough life to make layers, to make corals or some sort of microbial homes, and if it was buried on Mars, the same physics that took place on Earth could have happened there," he said. That, he suggests, is why the two sites are such a close match. Dr Brown and many other scientists had hoped that they would soon have the opportunity to get much closer to these rocks.

Nili Fossae was put forward as a potential landing site for Nasa’a ambitious new rover, the Mars Science Laboratory, which will be launched in 2011. The site was championed by other geologists, including John Mustard from Brown University in Rhode Island, whose team made the case to Nasa to have it included in the landing site shortlist for MSL. But Nilae Fossae was eventually deemed too dangerous a landing site and it was finally removed from the list in June of this year.

"The rover is being landed remotely – so there’s no human pilot involved; it’s all up to the robot. And [that’s] a very dangerous thing," said Dr Brown. "You need 20km of smooth terrain and unfortunately at this site it is pretty rocky – those ancient rocks are pretty weathered and the surface is rocky and uneven." "It will be visiting another interesting site when it lands, but this is the place that we should be checking out for life on early Mars."

John Grant, a scientist from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, and a member of the planetary sciences panel that advises Nasa on the MSL mission, spoke to BBC News earlier this year about the choice of landing site. He said that the objective of mission was a search for "habitability".

It was not, he said, a life detection mission. "[It] entails looking at geologic environments that may not only have been habitable but where signals associated with that habitability have been preserved," he told BBC News in February. But that does not alleviate the disappointment that many feel over having Nili Fossae and all its secrets taken off the table for the mission.

And what makes Mars Science Laboratory even more of a crucial mission for scientists is the fact that it will be the last rover to explore the surface of Mars until 2018 – partly because funding the mission has been so extraordinarily expensive. Dr Brown described the experience of having his favored landing site removed from the shortlist as the geological equivalent of having "your city’s Olympic bid rejected".

"I also see a race happening here," he said. "It might take us a couple of decades to build our capability to land [unmanned] rovers somewhere geologically interesting on Mars. "And in those decades, human space flight capabilities are going to develop and we could have the capability to send humans to Mars."

So in this race of the human versus the robots, which will win? "It’s my personal belief," said Dr Brown, "that by the time real human geologists get to go to Mars, the question of whether there is life on Mars will still be open."

Interesting2: China is struggling to clean up what has being described as the country’s worst oil spill, a fortnight after a fire at an oil depot caused crude to leak into the sea for several days. An army of volunteers and fishermen has been mobilized to help clean up the pollution from the area around the port of Dalian, one of China’s most important strategic oil reserves. But conditions are grim for those involved.

The scene at a small harbor where they are collecting the oil is like something out of the 19th Century. Fishermen covered in oil, some of them working just in their underwear, scrape up the toxic sludge that spilled out of the jars they have brought back from the open sea. No one is wearing protective goggles, facemasks or even gloves to protect them from the hazardous chemicals in the oil.

It takes them four or five hours to sail back from where they collect the oil on the open sea. They have to wait until nightfall, when the temperature drops, and the oil is at its most viscous, to scoop it out. "Cleaning the oil from the sea is tough, and it’s dangerous," says Qu Benhong, a fisherman who has taking a rest in the shade under a bridge. His overalls are covered in the shiny crude.

Next to him his friend’s bare legs are black, like they have been dipped in treacle. "We work day and night, around the clock, we can’t sleep," Mr Qu says. "Out there the waves are huge, it’s quite frightening." And yet every few minutes a new boat, laden with the jars of oil, arrives.

This is a massive operation, and although officials admit it is "arduous", the rows of hundreds of jars sitting on the quayside – each about half meter high, all filled to the brim – suggest a great deal of oil is being taken from the sea. Hundreds of thousands of gallons were spilled when two massive pipelines exploded at the depot.

The scars of the fire can still be seen – some of the massive storage silos are covered in black soot, two weeks after the devastating explosions there. China says the oil slick is under control and has not reached international waters. That is thanks in no small part to the efforts of the fishermen.

"I’ve been at sea for five days," another man says as he unloads his jars onto the back of a flat-bed truck. He is hoarse with exhaustion: "I didn’t sleep last night at all." Some here complain of headaches, vomiting and rashes on the skin. It is a horrible job, dirty, difficult and dangerous, but everyone here says they have no choice; their environment, their livelihoods are at risk, the have to do it.

Further down the coast on a beach that housed a shellfish farm before the spill contaminated it, Chai Chun Mei is squeezing oil from a rope into a bucket. She is using her bare hands. She needs to get the beach clean, though, if her family is to have a chance of getting the farm up and running again.

Further along the beach, environmental activists from the pressure group Greenpeace have brought an American expert to see the damage for himself. Zhong Yu from Greenpeace points out that it is more than a week since the government said the oil stretched across 430sq km. "Since then there have been no updates," she says. "That makes it hard for the people to work out where the oil will spread to next."

The expert she has brought with her, Prof Rick Steiner, who describes himself as an independent marine conservation consultant, listens as she and her colleagues try to explain to the locals the dangers of constant exposure to the oil. He believes this could turn out to be the worst oil spill this country has suffered.

"This is certainly the largest oil spill in China’s history, and I do find it ironic that U.S. and China have both had their largest oil spills at the same time. These hidden costs of oil are there whether we see them or not," he says. The government pays cash for oil ready for recycling.

But the fishermen may find getting proper compensation will be harder. The state owns the firm that spilled the crude so who will put pressure on them, people here are asking. "The pollution will harm our business for a long time," a fisherman grumbles as he loads up jars of oil collected from the beach onto his boat to be taken to the collection point for recycling.

"But I can’t do anything about it." His family struggles on – wading through the toxic sludge to push the boat off the beach – because they feel have no choice. They have to try to make a living while they can for once the clean up is finished, what then?

Interesting3: Emergency teams in north-east China are continuing to search a major river for barrels of toxic chemicals. Some 7,000 barrels were swept into the river in Jilin province on Wednesday; 3,000 contained the liquid chemicals. Officials said 2,978 drums had been retrieved, but it was unclear if they were empty or full, said state media.

China is suffering its worst seasonal flooding in a decade, which has left hundreds dead and missing across the country. Teams of workers using cranes and nets had managed to retrieve the 2,978 barrels from the Songhua river by midday on Friday, said the Xinhua news agency.

But there are concerns that some of the barrels, which were swept away from a factory in Jilin city, could have sunk to the riverbed, making them harder to find, the agency reports. The Songhua River is the largest tributary of the Heilongjiang river, also known as the Amur river in Russia, on the China-Russia border.

It is a source of drinking-water for several million people and is being tested for possible contamination, but officials have said there is no sign that the chemicals have leaked into the water. Water supplies in the city of 4.5 million people were briefly suspended and panic-buying reported as residents stocked up on bottled water.

But by Thursday morning water supplies had been mostly restored, reports said. Large parts of Jilin province remain under water after the intense flooding, which officials say has affected some 150,000 people. In Yongji County, at least 27 people have been killed since Sunday, officials told Xinhua, while 21,875 buildings were destroyed and 254,000 people evacuated.

Others were trapped as roads became impassable and bridges were swept away. "We can not go to the Yongji town as you can see the bridge has collapsed. Another bridge connecting Jilin City and Yongji has also collapsed," said local resident Zhang Weidong. "There is no way for us to go."

The Chinese authorities say a total of 134 million people in 28 provinces have been affected by the severe weather which has hit the country. Floods and landslides have left nearly 1,000 people dead and tens of thousands homeless.

Interesting4: When a magnitude 8.8 earthquake struck Chile on February 27, residents and seismologists knew it was a big one. But a new analysis reaffirms just how massive it was. The megathrust quake shook the continent for hundreds of kilometers, sending tsunami waves throughout the region and some speculate could even have altered the Earth’s axis. According to the new analysis, published online July 29 in Science, the rupture occurred along roughly 500 kilometers of fault line.

After collecting data from 33 sites, a team of seismologists, led by Marcelo Farias, a geologist at the University of Chile, were able to take meter-by-meter measurements of the surface deformations. Some places plunged as much as a meter downward and others were elevated at least two and a half meters.

The biggest vertical thrust happened in the Arauco Peninsula, "where marine platforms emerged, shifting the coastline up to 0.5 kilometers toward the ocean," the authors noted in the new report. In the uplift area, researchers found dried algae and mollusks on dry land that had previously been submerged in the tidal area.

The February 2010 earthquake is the fifth largest on record since 1900, the seismologists noted. Chile also holds the record for the largest earthquake in the past 110 years. The May 1960 quake registered a magnitude 9.5 and killed more than 1,600 people—in addition to more than 200 reported dead from the resulting tsunami that traveled across the Pacific Ocean to Japan.

The scientists proposed that the February earthquake released much of the energy that had been stored up since an 1835 rumbler in the region, which struck near the city of Concepcion and was noted by Charles Darwin in his journal from his second trip on the HMS Beagle. As the South American and Nazca Plates continue to converge at about 6.8 centimeters a year along a lengthy subduction zone, however, another big one will likely strike the coastal nation again some day.