An Eclectic Sunrise

It’s been a while since I posted a sunrise picture, but I’m looking for a short and easy post today.

We’ve been having a bit of nice Kona weather again. Yesterday was sunny but not hot, and the mountains were spectacularly clear most of the day. With no clouds, the night was almost chilly under a waning moon . And this morning, a few cirrus high clouds were spectacularly lit by the morning sun:

The reason I called this an “eclectic sunrise” is because a relatively new blog called Kaua’i Eclectic describes the same sunrise much more beautifully than I:

I’ve been wanting to mention this blog, but I didn’t get around to adding it to the blogroll until now. It’s written by Joan Conrow, whom I do not know personally, but the story of her blog is well known. She was a Kaua’i correspondent for the Honolulu Advertiser newspaper, including recent ferry news, until she was fired for voicing her personal anti-ferry opinions on her blog. So if you’re a ferry supporter, her writing will surely rub you the wrong way.

However, if you look beyond the politics, she is a keen observer of both mother nature and human nature. She usually writes about her morning walks and the people she meets, which lead her to expose some facet of Kaua’i or lesson she has learned from living here. But she does write a political blog, and so she keenly applies the lesson to the political target du jour.

If you shun the political reading, she has also written many articles for other Hawaiian publications such as the Honolulu Weekly (a free newspaper on Oahu) and the local airline magazines. From her descriptions of places and people, you can tell she is a spiritual person. Fortunately, her writing remains poetic, lyrical maybe, but rarely preachy. For example, she has an article about the mist in Koke’e and the Hindu temple on the Wailua river. On the right-hand side of her blog, she lists her own favorite pieces, including some about the Hawaiian sovereignty movement.

And by the way, as I write this in the evening, it is pouring down rain. Update: it rained over 5 inches last night, more in one night than any previous whole month since the March 2006 deluge. And it’s raining hard again this morning.

Wet, Wet, Wet

[Title with apologies to a band I never got into, but I know my college roommate liked them.]

Autumn has been gaining hold lately, with colder winds, rainy spells, and generally unsettled weather. I don’t understand weather well enough, but unsettled weather on Kauai means there are also periods when there are almost no clouds. When the sky is clear, the nights can be almost chilly in the 60’s (16-20 C), and that usually leads to rain when the sun warms the moist air. But it does give glimpses of Waialeale in the early morning before the clouds form.

But last Saturday was particularly rainy here on Kauai when a Kona storm moved through in the early morning. In the fall and winter, the tradewinds die down, and weather can come from the south and south-west, or from the district called Kona on most islands.

The morning started out clear, and looking east to where the tradewinds usually bring us our weather showed nothing alarming. Then it started getting dark again, and I saw a few grey clouds. When it really got so dark I had to turn the lights back on, I looked out south-west over the head of the Sleeping Giant and saw the black clouds rolling in. The rains came with a bit of thunder and lasted off and on all day and into the night. At dusk I saw some lightning, a relatively rare sight here in the tropics because of the humidity.

In the end, I measured 2 inches of rain by the next morning in the Wailua Houselots where I live, a generally drier slice of land close to the coast (average annual rainfall is around 50 inches or 125 cm). That’s the first rainfall significantly over one inch (2.5cm) in almost exactly a year, and the most in 24 hours since the infamous rains of March 2006.

Conclusions:

• For tourists, the beginning of November is often rainy on Kauai.
• For hikers, it’s wet and muddy on the trails right now, all over the island. The inland areas already got wet in October, so now they will be soggy. When the sun does come out, it doesn’t make the trail dry, it makes the air muggy.

Checking out some other blogs around the state, one of them reported this storm in real-time, and another mention the power outages in downtown Honolulu (glad to know it’s not just our rural island that suffers from these—schadenfreude). But best of all, the Honolulu Advertiser published this photo of snow on the Big Island (see also these older photos from the Mauna Kea Weather Center).

Image source: Honolulu Advertiser

By the way, I’m still looking for anecdotal or photographic evidence of snow on Kauai.

Hurricane Flossie

Everyone on Kauai is anxiously hoping that hurricane Flossy will spare the island. Memories and stories of hurricane Iniki’s direct hit on Sept 11, 1992, are still vivid. Today, everyone says the weather is strange: there’s lots of wind and the dark clouds at all altitudes with sunshine in between. It just doesn’t feel like the usual patterns—no wonder animals can tell when storms are coming.

Update 12 hours later: the storm is down to category 2 and skirting the Big Island, where they have a hurricane watch, closing schools and opening shelters. The storm is about 65 miles (100 km) from the island, which is a fortunate distance because hurricane strength winds are felt about 40 miles ( 65 km) from the center. They are expecting 5-10 inches (12-25 cm) of rain and 25-foot (8-meter) waves. What they did not expect was the 5.3 magnitude earthquate last night. State Parks on the Big Island are closed, and hikers on other islands should probably avoid trails as the storm approaches.

For a while, Flossie was a category 4 hurricane (on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale) and the Hawaiian islands were within the range of predicted paths. Over the last twelve hours, the storm has weakened and is predicted to stay to the south of the islands, though it could brush close enough for Kauai to experience severe winds:

Source: wunderground.com

The NOAA has lots of real-time maps that track hurricane Flossie, but I found the ones at wundergound.com to be slightly more readable. Among them is the following, found under Flash Tracker, an interactive map that shows the sea surface temperature (SST):

Source: wunderground.com

I find it interesting because the hurricane is predicted to weaken now that it has entered cooler water. This seems to be the case on the map above, but what happens when it reenters the warmer waters south of Kauai? The story I’ve heard several times about hurricane Iniki (other than it broke the anemometer at a wind speed of 200 mph–320 km/h) is that it curved away from Kauai and then turned around and went straight towards the island. I found a track of hurricane Iniki that disproves the story, but it does show that the hurricane followed an easterly course across the Pacific, much like Flossie, before turning north to Kauai around the point where Flossie is right now:

Source: Hurricane Iniki, a “souvenir” book by the Honolulu Advertiser

But enough talk about the weather, what’s happening on the ground? Well, everyone is preparing for the possibility of the hurricane causing an emergency situation on the island. I’ve heard that emergency response centers have opened on all islands, and everyone is going shopping to replenish their hurricane supplies. The recommendation is to have food and water for up to a week, but after Iniki, some roads were blocked for weeks, and some areas had no water or electricity for months.

Every hurricane season, we have stocked a cupboard full of canned food, but we forgot to refill our 5-gallon (20 liter) water jugs this year. We also decided to buy boards to cover our largest windows, and we were not alone. Lots of pick-up trucks were leaving the Home Depot in Lihue with sheets of plywood, but they had not run out. They had reportedly run out of generators, so maybe the ones I saw were already sold. Plastic tarps are used for covering furniture indoors, in case windows or roof get blown out and let the rain in. I found some at Ace Hardware in Lihue, but they were almost out the useful sizes. However, Ace was out of water (the small bottles that are not environtmentally-friendly), and they needed to refill their 500 gallon (2 m³) tank of propane:

Like everyone else, I ended up at the Costco warehouse store to buy the other essentials in bulk. Looking at the shopping carts of local people who probably lived through hurricane Iniki, I estimate that the most important items are: bottled water (in those small, wasteful bottles again), bleach (to purify more water), and toilet paper. They hadn’t run out of these items, but they had already opened new pallets from their reserves. Actually, the stores seemed to be handling the supplies fairly well, perhaps they know what to stock during the hurricane season. And fortunately, I didn’t notice any price gouging.

Disaster shopping has a strange feeling. Everyone is buying a lot of stuff, everyone hopes their preparation and spending will be in vain, and yet everyone is cheerful and helpful even with the threat of a hurricane. One person was even optimistic enough to buy a new rug, though maybe it was on sale. The newspaper also has some good stories (here and here) about the preparations.

My predictions may be nothing more than amateur speculation, but something always feels like a significant phenomenon when you can see it from space:

Source: NASA via Reuters via yahoo.com

Solar Hot Water

We finally had a solar hot water system installed in July, and I’m finally getting around to writing about it.

Solar hot water is just a no-brainer in Hawaii. Electricity and propane cost 2-3 times as much as the mainland, and we probably receive 2-3 times as much solar radiation (I don’t have the exact figures) for free. New systems cost $5-7,000, and used equipment such as ours was only $3,000, but there is a 35% State income tax credit, and 30% Federal tax credit, so the system pays for itself in less than 2 years. After that it’s free hot water for 15-20 years.

We had an old 40 gallon (150 liter) gas water heater that worked, but it wasn’t vented properly, so we knew since we bought the house two years ago that we wanted to replace it with a solar system. One of the installers on the island was selling second-hand systems that he removed from an army base on Oahu (many of the units needed maintenance on one part, so they replaced them all—I won’t criticize the army this time because taxpayer loss is my gain). So we now have a 120 gallon (600 liter) tank with three panels measuring 3′x8′ (0.9x2.4 m) each, or 72 sqf. (6.7 m^2) in all.

In the first picture you can see a photovoltaic panel above the hot water panels. It generates electricity to run the pump that circulates water from the tank up to the panels. I really wanted this option because it avoids having temperature sensors and a microcontroller running an AC pump. The DC pump runs for free when there is enough sunlight and therefore heat, plus it will keep the panels from boiling over during a daytime power outage. The one problem is that I suspect the PV output current is not quite calibrated, so it circulates water too early before the panels are hotter than the water remaining in tank. Maybe I can fix that with some resistors (anyone with electrical knowledge please feel free to leave a comment with the right way of fixing it).

In the second picture, cold water arrives through the copper pipe on the right. The pump is behind, and hot water returns from the roof in the other insulated pipe. Hot water goes to the house through the thermometer and out the copper pipe on the left. The other option I wanted is a thermostatic mixing valve that you see above the thermometer. It mixes cold water with the output of the tank to keep the water from scalding. The gray conduit is the electricity for the backup heater element.

So how well does it heat water? Well, we’ve never had to turn on the electrical backup heater, but there’s only been one day without sunshine so far this summer. In July and August, the tank would heat up to 130-140F (55-60C) and cool down to about 100F (38C) after usage and heat loss by morning. Now in September, the tank is actually getting over 150F (66C) each day because the sun is closer to the angle of the roof where the panels are (the summer sun would be more intense, but it strikes at an angle from the north). That’s another nice self-regulating feature of the system that keeps it from over heating.

Pink and Blue

I’ve been slowing down with the sunrises, but not for a lack of them. They’re getting earlier and earlier, and I’ve slept through a few good ones. Last Wednesday, it was worth getting up at 6:20 am to catch this one:

You can see 3 bird silhouettes in the sky here, those are the white cattle egrets you see everywhere on Kauai. Now that I’ve lived in this neighborhood for a year and watched them, I think I’ve got them figured out. They roost in the trees on the banks of the Wailua river and Opaekaa stream, I’ve seen them when kayaking there. In the morning, they fly north in groups to the cattle in the fields around Kapaa, and in the evening they go south again to roost.