Month: February 2012

Rainy Day

Used with permission from great-hikes.com
Thanks Andy :-)

The sound of the pouring rain woke me up this morning. It was barely light, but instead of lulling me back to sleep, the rain had me worried. This was the kind of rain that overflowed the gutters, saturated the ground, flowed around the house, and sometimes into the garage. I tried to go back to sleep, thinking the house was fine, it weathers these storms 2 or 3 times each year, but then I saw it was almost 8 am—the rainclouds were so thick they blotted out the light.

So I got out of bed, got out the umbrella and checked around the house. Sure enough, the gutters were overflowing, the back yard was saturated and covered deep puddles, and the garage was wet. There was also a mini waterfall down the neighbor’s hillside stairs. But other than some potted plants getting too much water and some erosion in the bare dirt of the garden, everything was fine.

It was also cold, so I put on socks and sweater and settled into a warm oatmeal breakfast with hot tea. The rain came and went, and came again. The heavy rain turned into a thunderstorm, with lightning and thunder off and on. The closest was a 3-one-thousand (3000 feet or 1km). The poor birds outside looked miserable:

WetBirdZebraDove
Zebra Dove
WetBirdJavaSparrow
Java Sparrow

I checked the NOAA website with rain gauge information, thinking it would be worse on Wai’ale’ale:

RainyDayMorning
Source: NOAA/National Weather Service

But no, the east side where I live was the rainiest, with Anahola getting over 5 inches (125mm) in just 3 hours. We couldn’t be too far behind, maybe 3.5-4 inches (88-100mm). Then I thought to check the stream gauge data for the Wailua river. This is tonight’s graph, with today’s peak data oddly missing (gauge overflow?). But what I saw in the morning was the continuous rise that could easily dwarf Friday’s peak.

RainyDayWailuaGauge
Source: USGS realtime stream gauge data

So I talked the family into going to see the east-side waterfalls, so we went for a Sunday drive in the country. And we were not disappointed. First was Opaeka’a falls:

OpaekaaFallsBooming1
OpaekaaFallsBooming2

Across the road, the Wailua river was running brown and looking like it was going to overflow its banks. The Kamokila village down there was closed (but maybe it’s not open on Sunday):

WailuaRiverRunningBrown

Then we drove to Wailua falls. Everthing along the road was soaked, and the ditches by the golf course were full. But there didn’t seem to be any flooding, so the county’s work on clearing the vegetation out of the drainage ditches has paid off. Even the Kaua’i roosters were soaked, their feathers dull and their tails drooping.

Wailua falls was even more impressive, with the full flow of the South Fork plunging over. I estimate there was 2-3 feet of water going over the full width of the waterfall—except the one place on the left where a tree was still clinging to the edge:

WailuaFallsBooming1

We stood there for over 15 minutes with our umbrellas, fascinated at the wall of water tumbling down. The brown water flowed over in a solid sheet, then it separated into streams and finally separated into white water drops in very intricate and ever-changing patterns. I tried to get a photo of the effect, but my camera is not good enough, so this is just an enlargement of the previous photo:

WailuaFallsBooming2

Almost as impressive was the massive cloud of spray that was blowing the trees like a strong wind. We did see two tropic birds flying around, wondering why they were flying in the mist and what the view was like from there. And with all that water, the round pool at the bottom was gone, all the rocks and vegetation covered by the outflow.

WailuaFallsPoolOverflow

On the way home, I pulled over at Wailua beach and walked on the bike path back across the new bridge. The river mouth was spread out wider than the length of the bridge:

WailuaRiverMouth

The rains finally stopped in the afternoon, and there were even some nice sunset colors. Tonight, I looked up the total rain for the past 24 hours. Different parts of the island received rain at different times last night and today, but the overall totals are all above 3 inches (75 mm), with an average of 5.6 inches (142mm) across the entire island.

RainyDayTotals
Source: NOAA/National Weather Service

Einhundertundeighty

So… let me see… das is Einhundertundeighty…
(for the English-only speakers Leilani switched languages in the middle of the word, sounds pretty funny if you speak both and hear her say it)

Old Blog Header

that one? …

The winner!

January 2012

Pink-spotted Hawkmoth or Sweetpotato Hornworm (Agrius cingulata)

We went to see the Shanghai Circus in Lihue


We had much colder mornings in February though




False Roselle or Cranberry Hibiscus, African Rose Mallow (Hibiscus acetosella) makes beautiful tea…

…which also works well as an indicator liquid in science projects


Andy, Rosemary and Leilani went to the Taro Patch







Halloween and Whatever Photos Were Left from October


Can you find Waldo?

Can you find Waldo again? And the pretty princess?

No, she didn’t eat the loot, not even Andy managed to…

An exercise from one of her Math books

Instead of making chocolate we planted all the seeds and have about 10 pretty nice Theobroma cacao mini-trees

Julia came for a sleepover!