Air Temperatures – The following high temperatures (F) were recorded across the state of Hawaii Sunday…along with the low temperatures Sunday:

81 – 76  Lihue, Kauai
89 – 78  Honolulu, Oahu
89 – 76  Molokai AP
90 – 71  Kahului AP, Maui
88 – 76  Kailua Kona
86 – 73  Hilo AP, Hawaii

Here are the latest 24-hour precipitation totals (inches) for each of the islands Sunday:

3.33  Mount Waialeale, Kauai
0.81  Nuuanu Upper, Oahu
0.01  Molokai
0.08  Lanai
 0.00  Kahoolawe
0.33  West Wailuaiki, Maui
2.54  Pahoa, Big Island

The following numbers represent the strongest wind gusts (mph) Sunday:

28  Port Allen, Kauai
35  Oahu Forest NWR, Oahu
27  Molokai
21  Lanai
39  Kahoolawe
27  Kahului AP, Maui
29  South Point, Big Island

Hawaii’s Mountains – Here’s a link to the live webcam on the summit of our tallest mountain Mauna Kea (nearly 13,800 feet high) on the Big Island of Hawaii. Here’s the webcam for the 10,000+ feet high Haleakala Crater on Maui. These webcams are available during the daylight hours here in the islands, and at night whenever there’s a big moon shining down. Also, at night you will be able to see the stars, and the sunrise and sunset too…depending upon weather conditions.


Aloha Paragraphs


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A tropical disturbance well east-southeast…Here’s what the computer models are showing
(click to enlarge)


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Thunderstorms far west, southwest and southeast

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Partly to mostly cloudy...clear areas locally

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Showers locally and offshore…some are quite generous
 Looping image

 

Small Craft Advisory…windiest coasts and channels around Maui County and the Big Island

 

~~~ Hawaii Weather Narrative ~~~

 

Broad Brush Overview: An elongated zone of high pressure remains parked far to the north of the Hawaiian Islands, and will continue to maintain moderate trade winds through the upcoming work week. Enhanced showers mainly over windward and mountain slopes will continue in an unstable environment. Some showers will drift over leeward areas at times, especially in the overnight periods. Drier and more stable weather returns to the island chain Monday and Tuesday. A more active shower pattern may develop on Wednesday and Thursday…as a disturbance in the deep tropics passes by south of the Big Island.

Details:  An active area of low pressure, with several low centers remains north of the Hawaiian Islands. Bands of cirrus clouds are evident on satellite imagery moving across the islands from west to east. Showers will continue to develop in the trade wind flow, primarily affecting windward and mountain areas of each island, with brief periods of showers drifting over leeward areas…as a more unstable air mass lingers over the state for the time being. Some showers may become locally heavy at times and isolated thunderstorms are possible.

Models continue to show enough instability for enhanced showers through Monday morning. The upper level flow associated with a low pressure system to the northwest of the islands, will support these showers, with the highest chances along windward and mountain slopes. This flow will exit the area Monday, with an upper level ridge taking its place…helping to stabilize the atmosphere through Tuesday. As we push into Wednesday and Thursday, a disturbance in the deep tropics will pass by to the south of the Big Island. Enough additional moisture and instability may be drawn up over the islands for increasing showers mainly along windward and mountain areas of Hawaii and Maui Counties.

Looking Ahead: Long range model solutions suggest the deep tropics will become more active from Wednesday onward, with disturbances passing by to the south of the state through next weekend. Each of these disturbances has the potential to push deep moisture and instability northward…possibly producing periods of increasing showers over the islands.

Here’s a near real-time Wind Profile of the Pacific Ocean – along with a Closer View of the islands / Here’s the latest Weather Map / Here’s the latest Vog Forecast Animation / Here’s the Vog Information website

Marine Environmental Conditions: A ridge of high pressure remains in place far north of the islands. This will result in locally strong trade winds to persist well into the new work week. A Small Craft Advisory (SCA) is in place over the sensitive waters around Maui County and waters south of the Big Island through Monday afternoon. Additional extensions of the SCA are likely to follow. An area of low pressure will be passing south of the islands about the middle of the week, which may bump up the trades another notch or two…as well as expanding the coverage of the SCA.

With the surf, the choppy trade wind swell will produce surf mainly in the moderate range along the east facing shores through most of the new week. The strengthening trades during mid week will increase the surf to near advisory level for the east facing shores. A new southwest will arrive, and should maintain surf in the small to moderate range along the south and west facing shores. This swell will slowly fade through Monday night. The next rise from the south is slated for Wednesday nigh…a similar magnitude swell follows Friday night.

An upper level trough northwest of Kauai that will lead to the potential for a thunderstorm over the waters north of Kauai and Oahu through Monday night.

The surface low encroaching on the southeast offshore waters will bring on a slight chance of a thunderstorm around the middle of the week.



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World-wide Tropical Cyclone Activity

 

Here’s the latest Pacific Disaster Center (PDC) Weather Wall Presentation covering Subtropical Storm Beryl in the Atlantic Ocean

Here’s the latest Pacific Disaster Center (PDC) Weather Wall Presentation covering the Pacific and Indian Oceans, including Tropical Cyclone 11W, and tropical disturbances…being referred as Invest 93W, 94W and Invest 99E


>>> Atlantic Ocean: No active tropical cyclones

>>> Caribbean Sea: No active tropical cyclones

>>> Gulf of Mexico: No active tropical cyclones

Tropical cyclone formation is not expected during the next 5 days.

Here’s a satellite image of the Caribbean Sea…and the Gulf of Mexico

Here’s the link to the National Hurricane Center (NHC)

>>> Eastern Pacific: No active tropical cyclones

1.) There’s a tropical disturbance in the NE Pacific…with a high chance of developing

Here’s what the computer models are showing for this disturbance

According to the NHC…Showers and thunderstorms in association with a low pressure system located about 1150 miles east-southeast of the Big Island of Hawaii continue to show signs of organization. Environmental conditions are expected to be conducive for the development of a tropical depression during the next day or so before upper-level winds become less conducive by mid-week. This system is moving westward and is expected to cross into the Central Pacific basin later today.

* Formation chance through 48 hours…high…80 percent
* Formation chance through 5 days…high…80 percent

2.) There’s a second tropical disturbance in the NE Pacific…with a low chance of developing

According to the NHC…Shower and thunderstorm activity associated with a tropical wave located several hundred miles south-southwest of the southern tip of the Baja California Peninsula has changed little over the past several hours. This disturbance is producing wind gusts to near gale force to the east of the wave axis. Although the environment is expected to be only marginally conducive, some additional development is possible during the next day or so while the system moves westward to west-northwestward. By Wednesday, strong upper-level winds will likely prevent further development.

* Formation chance through 48 hours…low…30 percent
* Formation chance through 5 days…low…30 percent

Here’s a wide satellite image that covers the entire area between Mexico, out through the central Pacific…to the International Dateline.

Here’s a wide satellite image that covers the entire area between Mexico, out through the central Pacific…to the International Dateline.

Here’s the link to the National Hurricane Center (NHC)

>>> Central Pacific: No active tropical cyclones

Here’s a link to the Central Pacific Hurricane Center (CPHC)

>>> Northwest Pacific Ocean: 

Tropical Cyclone 11W


>>> South Pacific Ocean: No active tropical cyclones

>>> North and South Indian Oceans / Arabian Sea: No active tropical cyclones


Here’s a link to the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC)


Interesting:  How Much Trash Is on Mount Everest? Mount Everest has a mountain of a problem: human waste. And not just leftover camping meals, beer and fuel cans, but human poo, too.

So, how much poopy and other garbage calls the planet’s highest mountain home?

A Tech Times story describes the mountain as “the world’s highest garbage dump.” But Alton Byers, a mountain geologist at the Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado Boulder, said this description is not entirely accurate. The problem is worse in areas off the mountain than on it. In surrounding areas, you’ll find dozens of landfills at various lodges and villages throughout Sagarmatha National Park, where Mount Everest resides.

The peak of Mount Everest rests at 29,029 feet above sea level, on the northern edge of Sagarmatha National Park, within the Khumbu region of Nepal. Everest is part of the Himalayas, a mountain range in Asia stretching about 1,500 miles across the countries of Bhutan, India, Nepal, China, Pakistan and Afghanistan. The range resulted from the Indian subcontinent crashing into the Tibetan plateau 40 million to 50 million years ago, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

In 1922, several mountaineers and others who were part of the British Mount Everest expedition made the first attempt to reach the top of the world, but were unsuccessful. In 1953, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first people to successfully reach the summit. Since then, thousands of adventurers have followed in the expedition’s footsteps. In the late 1990s, Everest became a major destination for adventure tourists. More recently, Sagarmatha National Park has seen upwards of 150,000 visitors every year, with several hundreds attempting an Everest climb, according to Byers.

Climbers traveling to the bottom of the majestic mountain for the first time might be surprised to find half-buried fluorescent tents, fuel bottles and other miscellaneous pieces of old camp sites strewn about the base camps. For the most part, other climbers and porters will clean up the camp sites before the climbing season ends, Byers said. “It’s remarkable how clean they’ve been able to keep it of litter,” he said. The real problem is what happens with that litter.

What goes up should come down

For over three decades, Byers has studied alpine conservation and restoration in the Nepal Himalayan region. He said there are two types of garbage in the Everest region.

The first kind is litter from climbers that is strewn from base camps all the way up to the summit. “That’s what you read about in these press releases,” he said. That trash is primarily managed by the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee (SPCC), a nonprofit and nongovernment organization that does its best to keep the Khumbu region clean. With support from locals, the SPCC cleans and maintains several climbing routes. The organization also installed over 70 trash containers along trails and provides door-to-door garbage collection in some of the larger villages.

But the SPCC’s efforts are limited, and waste-management rules aren’t well-enforced. Troy Aupperle, an experienced mountaineer who’s climbed Everest twice and summitted once, told Live Science that, compared with other “managed” mountains he’s climbed, Everest is a free-for-all. “Compare it to Denali,” the 20,310-foot (6,190 m) mountain in Alaska, he said. “They grill you — ‘What have you done?’ ‘Are you worthy of climbing this mountain?’ Then, they lay out all these ground rules.” On Everest, however, he said, “There’s no rules, no accountability, no nothing.”

Aupperle said he doesn’t think visiting climbers are concerned with getting their trash back down the mountain. “You barely have enough energy to get yourself off the mountain, so anything you don’t have to carry or can get rid of, you just off-load so you can get down,” Aupperle said. But he was impressed when he witnessed a crew of Nepalese climbers clean up a crashed Russian helicopter, carrying it down the mountain piece by piece, he said.

The world’s highest landfills

Byers said the second type of garbage is generated by the hundred or so lodges in towns throughout the Khumbu region. Lodge owners bury what they consider burnable garbage in pits, he said. The pits are anywhere from 270 square feet to 2,150 square feet, and Byers estimated that there are “dozens, maybe hundreds” of them.

Within those pits are thousands of tons of solid waste: plastic, aluminum beer cans, glass whiskey bottles, paper products and more. When burned, the garbage releases poisons in the air, and once buried, it leaches toxic chemicals into the water, Byers said. He said he suspects that the lodge owners aren’t interested in recycling, because it’s expensive. “If it means losing money, they’re not going to do it,” he said.

Yet another major problem throughout the region is human excrement. Local climbers are hired to bring the poop  down in barrels from base camps and dump it into pits; the waste then washes downstream during monsoon season in the summer. Byers estimated that over 12,000 lbs. of human waste from the Everest base camps results from the diarrhea and other intestinal problems that so many visitors experience each year because the waste isn’t completely filtered from the water supply.

Some possible solutions

The trash problem around Everest might be enormous, but it’s not hopeless. Out of the thousands of tourists that visit annually, a few have returned to do what they can to help clean up the park in an efficient and affordable way.

The Mount Everest Biogas Project, for example, focuses on cleaning up Gorak Shep, a village near Mount Everest in Sagarmatha National Park, located at 17,000 feet elevation. The village can be reached only by a strenuous six-day hike from the nearest airport, states the biogas project’s website. There are no electrical, sanitation or water-supply systems in the town, but all human waste from several base camps gets brought back to this village and placed in a landfill.

The project aims to redirect human waste to an anaerobic digester system, which is described on the project’s website as “a large tank where microorganisms feed on a mixture of water and bacteria found in organic waste, breaking down the waste and producing two by products: methane and a pathogen-reduced effluent.” The system would provide a more environmentally friendly way of dealing with human waste.

Another effort to fix the trash problem comes from Sagarmatha next, an organization that aims to create art out of trash collected from Sagarmatha National Park. The group has plans to build a center near the town of Namche Bazaar that will help with waste management, art and community development.

The efforts from these organizations are promising, but there’s still plenty of room for more, Byers said. “Everest base camp cleanups should continue,” he said. “But we’ve got to figure out ways to recycle.”