Hurricane Lane Updates And More Smoke Attacks

Hurricane Lane continued to batter Hawaii overnight and this morning, and it's going to be a long day on the island chain.

This chart supplied by NOAA shows air pressure falling
dramatically, and winds increasing, then suddenly stopping,
then picking up again as the eye of Hurricane Lane
passed over a weather monitoring buoy south of Hawaii

Meanwhile, smoke from wildfires continues to make life unpleasant or worse in many parts of the world.

HURRICANE LANE

At last check, Hurricane Lane was a Category 3 storm with winds of up to 120 mph. It was grinding slowly northward toward Maui and Oahu.  Wind shear is slowly weakening the storm and these strong upper level winds will influence the path of the storm and the degree of destruction in Hawaii.

If the wind shear weakens Hurricane Lane relatively quickly, its northward path will abruptly shift toward the west, sparing much of the state the worst of the hurricane's effects.

If Hurricane Lane weakens a little more slowly than expected, the center of the storm will come close to or even possibly over the islands before turning west, which of course would make things much much worse.

The betting now is that the westward turn will come before Hurricane Lane reaches the islands. Still, it's already close enough to cause a lot of problems and that will just get worse today.

Already, more than 18 inches of rain has fallen on the Big Island of Hawaii, and there's been lots of flash flooding. One town has picked up 26 inches of rain so far. (For comparison's sake, here in Vermont, Burlington has had 22 inches of precipitation so far this year. So we've had less rain in eight months than that town in Hawaii had in a couple of days. )

The flooding will get worse as the hurricane slowly makes its way past Hawaii. Some places could get up to 40 inches of rain.

Wind and battering surf will be bring problems with Hurricane Lane, but the worst of it will be the flooding. Seems like that's a trend.

Oddly, in one are of Maui, it hasn't rained much yet and the wind is picking up. That's spreading a brush fire of all things that has forced the evacuation of a storm emergency shelter.

Speaking of wildfires...….

LOTS OF SMOKE, STILL

A recent hazy sunset in St. Albans this morning, created
by smoke from western wildfires overhead. The haze
has gained and ebbed, and was fairly thick this
morning, at least aloft.

When I got up this morning in St. Albans, Vermont the sky, which should have been blue, was covered with a milky haze.

That's wildfire smoke blowing overhead. It is hazy at ground level, too, but it's not that bad. Most of the polllution here is high overhead, so as of this morning, the air isn't terribly unhealthy. 

Not so in many other places as wildfires continue to burn in large swaths of forest in the Northern Hemisphere during this long, hot summer.

We talked the other day about how awful it was in Seattle, but a wind shift off the ocean is greatly improving air quality there.

Inland, though, it's a different story. Air quality alerts remain in place for a large area of the northern Rocky Mountains.

In Germany, smoke choked Berlin because of a nearby forest fire. Worse, the area where the fire was burning has unexploded bombs left over from World War II, Reuters reports.  How's that for a fire fighting hazard?

According to Climate Central, the increase in the number of wildfire smoke days threatens to undo the progress made under the 1970 Clean Air Act. Emissions from factories and cars are cleaner than they used to be, but the rising trend in wildfires and wildfire smoke is working against that progress.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is seeking to relax Clean Air Act rules.

Sigh.