First hurricane in 22 years aiming for Hawaii

ABC News via AP: ...At the White House, President Barack Obama was briefed by his homeland security adviser on preparations for the storms that are threatening his birthplace. Spokesman Josh Earnest said administration officials will remain in close contact with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other agencies that are that are preparing to help with response and recovery efforts as the storms near.

Hawaii has been directly hit by hurricanes only three times since 1950, though the region has had 147 tropical cyclones over that time. Meteorologist Eric Lau said the last time Hawaii was hit with a tropical storm or hurricane was in 1992, when Hurricane Iniki killed six people and destroyed more than 1,400 homes in Kauai, said meteorologist Eric Lau.

Hurricane Iselle was supposed to weaken as it slowly trudged west across the Pacific. It didn't — and now Hawaii is poised to take its first direct hurricane hit in 22 years. Iselle is on course to hit the Big Island tonight, and is being tailed by Hurricane Julio, which strengthened early today into a Category 2 storm....

NASA image of Iselle August 4, 2014

Hawaii's governor signs climate change adaptation bill

Hawaii News Now: Gov. Neil Abercrombie on Monday signed House Bill 1714 (Act 83), the Hawaii Climate Adaptation Initiative Act, which establishes a committee to address climate change adaptation statewide. The main focus of the Act is to prepare the state's environment and economy for any threats that might arise due to climate change.

"Over the last hundred years we've seen sea level here in Hawaii rise nearly eight inches," said Rep. Chris Lee. "Our rate of warming in the last 50 years has nearly doubled, and that's reduced our trade winds and our rainfall. These are the challenges that we are going to have to face in the years to come. Ultimately, climate change can have a devastating impact on our local economy and our way of life if we continue to lose our beaches, our reefs and our fresh water supply."

The committee will include designated members of the Department of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR) and Office of Planning (OP). The adaptation committee under the DLNR will develop a sea-level rise and vulnerability report addressing statewide impacts until the year 2050. The OP will be in charge of development of the adaptation plans and policy recommendations, using the committee's report as a framework.

"We have a chance to change our future," said Rep. Lee. "Planning ahead now will save billions of dollars for our next generation and it will make us secure, safe and give our next generation of children an opportunity to much of the same Hawaii that we have today."

NASA image of the island of Hawaii

Asian ozone pollution in Hawaii is tied to climate variability

Joanne Curcio in the Princeton Journal Watch:  Air pollution from Asia has been rising for several decades but Hawaii had seemed to escape the ozone pollution that drifts east with the springtime winds. Now a team of researchers has found that shifts in atmospheric circulation explain the trends in Hawaiian ozone pollution.

The researchers found that since the mid-1990s, these shifts in atmospheric circulation have caused Asian ozone pollution reaching Hawaii to be relatively low in spring but rise significantly in autumn. The study, led by Meiyun Lin, an associate research scholar in the Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (NOAA) at Princeton University and a scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, was published in Nature Geoscience.

“The findings indicate that decade-long variability in climate must be taken into account when attributing U.S. surface ozone trends to rising Asian emissions,” Lin said. She conducted the research with Larry Horowitz and Songmiao Fan of GFDL, Samuel Oltmans of the University of Colorado and the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder; and Arlene Fiore of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University.

Although protective at high altitudes, ozone near the Earth’s surface is a greenhouse gas and a health-damaging air pollutant. The longest record of ozone measurements in the U.S. dates back to 1974 in Hawaii. Over the past few decades, emissions of ozone precursors in Asia has tripled, yet the 40-year Hawaiian record revealed little change in ozone levels during spring, but a surprising rise in autumn.

Through their research, Lin and her colleagues solved the puzzle. “We found that changing wind patterns ‘hide’ the increase in Asian pollution reaching Hawaii in the spring, but amplify the change in the autumn,” Lin said.

...“This study not only solves the mystery of Hawaiian ozone changes since 1974, but it also has broad implications for interpreting trends in surface ozone levels globally,” Lin said. “Characterizing shifts in atmospheric circulation is of paramount importance for understanding the response of surface ozone levels to a changing climate and evolving global emissions of ozone precursors,” she said....

Asian pollution drifts east toward North America in 2010. Hawaii is denoted by the star. (Source: Nature Geoscience)

Flossie weakens to tropical depression on Hawaii approach

Yee Kai Pin and Matthew Brown in Bloomberg: Flossie weakened to a depression as it neared the Hawaiian Islands, while tropical-storm warnings were discontinued.

The system, with top winds of 35 miles (56 kilometers) per hour, was 65 miles north-northwest of Honolulu and 270 miles northwest of Hilo at about 11 p.m. local time yesterday, according to an advisory from the Central Pacific Hurricane Center in Honolulu. It was moving west-northwest at 18 mph.

Flossie had threatened to become the first major system to strike Hawaii in 21 years. The state hasn’t been hit by a tropical storm or hurricane since Hurricane Iniki in 1992, said Kristina Pydynowski, a meteorologist at AccuWeather.com, a forecaster in State College, Pennsylvania.

The U.S. Coast Guard re-opened the ports of Hilo and Kawaihae on the Big Island at 1 p.m. yesterday, while keeping the port of Kahului, Maui closed, it said in a statement on its website yesterday...

Tropical Storm Flossie over Hawaii on July 29, 2013, shot by those storm-tossed mad folk at NASA

Number of hurricanes reaching hawaii could triple this century

RedOrbit: Hawaii could experience a two-to-three fold increase in the number of tropical cyclones by the year 2100, according to new research published Sunday in the online edition of Nature Climate Change. Only two hurricanes have made landfall in the island state over the past three decades, but that is likely to change during the last quarter of this century, computer simulations developed by scientists at the University of Hawaii at Manoa’s International Pacific Research Center (IPRC) have revealed.

“Computer models run with global warming scenarios generally project a decrease in tropical cyclones worldwide. This, though, may not be what will happen with local communities,” lead author Hiroyuki Murakami, a postdoctoral fellow at the IPRC, said in a statement.

Murakami and Bin Wang, a climate expert that the university’s meteorology department, joined forces with Akio Kitoh of the Meteorological Research Institute (MRI) to determine whether or not climate change would lead to an increase in the frequency of tropical cyclones in the years ahead.

“The scientists compared in a state-of-the-art, high-resolution global climate model the recent history of tropical cyclones in the North Pacific with a future (2075–2099) scenario, under which greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, resulting in temperatures about 2°C higher than today,” the university explained.

“In our study, we looked at all tropical cyclones, which range in intensity from tropical storms to full-blown category 5 hurricanes,” Murakami added. “From 1979 to 2003, both observational records and our model document that only every four years on average did a tropical cyclone come near Hawaii. Our projections for the end of this century show a two-to-three-fold increase for this region.”

According to the researchers, the primary reasons for this increase will be changes in large-scale moisture conditions, as well as wind flow and surface temperature patterns changes, all caused by warming temperatures stemming from global climate change....

A rainbow in Hawaii, shot by Remember, Wikimedia Commons, public domain

In Hawaii, new high-resolution carbon mapping provides more accurate results

Science Daily: A team of scientists from the Carnegie Institution for Science's Department of Global Ecology and the USDA Forest Service's Pacific Southwest Research Station (PSW) has developed new, more accurate methods for mapping carbon in Hawaii's forests.

….The growing market for private and public entities to purchase carbon offsets has led to a need to find better monitoring techniques to accurately quantify the amount of carbon (C) held in our nation's forests. Combining field measurements, airborne Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR)-based observations, and satellite-based imagery, the team developed a 30-meter-resolution map of above-ground carbon density spanning 40 vegetation types found on the one million-hectare Island of Hawaii.

The team estimated a total of 28.3 million tons of carbon sequestered in aboveground woody vegetation on the island, which is 56 percent lower than estimates by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that were not intended to resolve carbon variation at fine spatial scales. The approach reveals fundamental ecological controls over carbon storage, including the role of climate, introduced species, and land-use change, and provides a fourfold decrease in regional costs of carbon measurement over using only those samples collected in the field.

This new approach moves well beyond merely sampling the carbon contained in forests of a given region and/or forest type with relatively few forest inventory plots. Now, these researchers can -- by correlating plot-based estimates of forest C mass with LiDAR measures of canopy structure -- actually measure forest C across a wide diversity of environmental and forest conditions….

Oahu's Lyon Arboretum, shot by Daderot, who has released the image into the public domain

Warming a threat to birds, coral reef

Honolulu Advertiser: Hawai'i has some advantages over other areas when it comes to climate change, but the state's native forest bird and coral reef populations could be severely damaged, a climate change biologist said this week.

Conservation International scientist Lee Hannah said that while projected temperature change in Hawai'i is less than elsewhere, native species could still suffer from climate change. But he also said extinctions of species in Hawai'i and around the world are not inevitable and that policymakers need to limit greenhouse gas emissions and improve conservation strategies. "It's certainly not a case where all is lost," he said. "Climate change is another factor, and we need to respond to it, but it's certainly not a reason to give up hope because we have good conservation tools. We just need to employ them in ways that take climate change into account."

Hannah was among the scientists who spoke at this week's Forum on Climate Change in Hawai'i, which was sponsored by the Hawai'i Conservation Alliance, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Geological Survey….

Ka'anapali from the air, shot by Mike Johnston from Atlanta, Wikimedia Commons