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So here I am sitting in Central Texas as the temperatures are dropping into the single digits as the land around me gets dominated by ice and snow, the most foreign sights I have ever seen in this state.. ..reducing power consumption in the now dark and lonely room as our power capacity was hamphered by frozen Wind Mills and shut down Natural Gas facilities.. ..and I just started pondering.. with my limited knowledge of how weather works outside of some Jet Stream having the bottom fall out unleashing a fury of Artic air over most of the country granting us weather that only Santa is supposed to experience... and my thoughts were ..'Hmmm.. I wonder if such a storm could ever drop over the Pacific Ocean and float its way to Hawaii and if it did, could it drop the temperature to our record lows..'
..indeed.. I'm a bored Texan locked in this dark little room with too much time to think on my hands.. but I must know the answer!
Yup, what WV said. Hawaii sits in the middle of a pretty big pond which keeps things at a pretty steady temperature. In Hawaii, temperature seems to be more effected by elevation than anything else. There's usually snow up on Mauna Kea each winter and there's even snow on Mauna Loa this year. But, below the mountains down by the coast, it's still mid-fifties in the dead of night.
I think Hawaii has the least change of annual temperatures of just about anywhere.
...'Hmmm.. I wonder if such a storm could ever drop over the Pacific Ocean and float its way to Hawaii and if it did, could it drop the temperature to our record lows..'
No, certainly not your record lows. The thermal capacity of water is over 4 times that of air and Hawaii is surrounded by a lot of ocean that would take a long time to cool off enough to sustain cold temperatures.
Even Pribilof islands at a fairly high latitude in Alaska don't get very cold anymore, due to less seasonal ocean ice and ocean temperatures greatly exceeding historical averages lately.
Record lows for Hawaii could result from such an air mass though.
La Nina conditions now exist, with tropical water temperatures being cooler than normal. However, in this map you can see that Hawaii is still within a warmer than average patch of water.
I some times keep track of the temperature readings. For the most part it remains between 70 degrees to 88 degrees on a normal spring day. I think it does good if I choose to keep up with this reading. So that I will know whether to wear a jacket on a cold night out or no jacket on a hot summer night.
Actually, this whole disaster may happen again next year. It isn't 'global warming' but 'climate change' and more extremes are going to keep showing up. We've had bigger storms and more of them pretty much everywhere. There will probably be some 'extremes' in Hawaii as well, but we do have that big ocean cushion out there to ameliorate the extremes to something much less so, we hope. Although, in 2018, we did have a lot of lava running around causing trouble but that wasn't really a result of climate change, Pele has been doing that for ages.
Actually, this whole disaster may happen again next year. It isn't 'global warming' but 'climate change' and more extremes are going to keep showing up. We've had bigger storms and more of them pretty much everywhere. There will probably be some 'extremes' in Hawaii as well, but we do have that big ocean cushion out there to ameliorate the extremes to something much less so, we hope. Although, in 2018, we did have a lot of lava running around causing trouble but that wasn't really a result of climate change, Pele has been doing that for ages.
Perhaps climate change will tend to steer hurricanes nearer to the Hawaiian Islands than historical averages.
So here I am sitting in Central Texas as the temperatures are dropping into the single digits as the land around me gets dominated by ice and snow, the most foreign sights I have ever seen in this state.. ..reducing power consumption in the now dark and lonely room as our power capacity was hamphered by frozen Wind Mills and shut down Natural Gas facilities.. ..and I just started pondering.. with my limited knowledge of how weather works outside of some Jet Stream having the bottom fall out unleashing a fury of Artic air over most of the country granting us weather that only Santa is supposed to experience... and my thoughts were ..'Hmmm.. I wonder if such a storm could ever drop over the Pacific Ocean and float its way to Hawaii and if it did, could it drop the temperature to our record lows..'
..indeed.. I'm a bored Texan locked in this dark little room with too much time to think on my hands.. but I must know the answer!
No, not your record lows. Water has a thermal capacity that is more than four times that of air, and Hawaii is surrounded by a large body of water that would take a long time to cool off enough to sustain cold temperatures.
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