9/1/15 Three CAT 4 Storms, Kilo, Ignacio and Jimena
There were four storms in August, Guillermo (2 Aug), Kilo (15 Aug), Igancio (31 Aug) and Jimena (ok September) that concern us here in the Hawaiian Islands. As of Today 9/1/15, Ignacio is looking like it will track to the North. Jimena also is forecast to track to the north when it passes Hawaii in it’s westward track.
The hurricane threat to Hawaii is growing due to the increased frequency of hurricanes on the one hand, and on the other, the sheer growth in the numbers of people and structures threatened. There is just more of us and our stuff at stake. My little townhouse in Aiea was build in the 60’s and hurricanes could not have been further from the mind of the developer, intent of flipping his parcel of former sugar cane land, carefully scraped free of topsoil into terraced developements for homes. If one of these hurricanes hit us dead on we’re going to be like the first two of the three little pigs cowering behind the shaking doors and walls of wood, and sheetrock, Yikes.
We speculate about whether the changing climate is the cause of these hurricanes but that’s in a sense a wierd way of looking at the situation — hurricanes have always been around – the current climate just contains more of them. Hurricanes and everything else that spins, churns, and blows in the Earth’s atmosphere is how the planetary solution for what to do with energy. The ocean is especially warm in the equatorial Pacific right now. This happens every so many years with enough regularity for humans to recognize a pattern when we see it — we call it el Nino after the name given to it by Peruvian sailors in the 19th century who noted that warm ocean current events occurred around the Christmas season. I learned about el Nino in the late 70’s from my Climatology professor Jen Hu Chang at the University of Hawaii… Back then there was speculation that the heat in the water was doing something on a large even planetary scale, All atmospheric phenomena are nature’s solution to what to do with energy on a planet blanketed by a thick atmosphere, fat with water billowing out of oceans through evaporation to form islands of water floating in the skies. Hurricanes are of the more spectacular and transient genera of such energy systems.
These days there is also the cold water counterpart that is called la Nina… I’m sorry but this is silly and frivolous play on words, and I wish “they” had come up with another name. I am not going to talk about “ln” anymore. I would rather it was called “cold phase ocean oscillation” or “cold ocean”. The expression “El nino” comes out of deep cultural perhaps nautical tradition with poetic and deep associative linguistic allusions – “la nina” to me is derivative and somehow insulting to baby girls…
Space Time Works 