VOG

[Daniel]

Ok it may be a false alarm, the wind is kinda haywire today. In hilo its trades, but here in upper hpp its coming out of the south. But still be prepared[]

Daniel R Diamond

[macuu222]

I live in HPP... close to the ocean. And I can honestly say that if it wasn't for all the news coverage and talk about the volcano vent spewing large amounts of sulfur and making breathing unbearable...I would have never known. I'm an asmatic and very sensitive to air pollution.

Every once in a long while we may get a hint of the stuff...but it doesn't stay long here where I live. Even with the volcano acting up...we still have some of the freshest air on the planet. And with the winds blowing "predominitely from the east" the people who will really suffer are the ones living on the west side.

Today is a good example of some excellent fresh air blowing on shore.

[Spider Tim]

It makes me wonder why anyone would want to live in Kona? It is beautiful and has nice beaches, but Inflated prices, Vog and even more traffic these are daily problems for what seems like not as much gain. It doesn't add up in my head just to stay a little drier. Perhaps I need to live there to "Get" it.

[Easygoing]

Spider if more people thought like you then the RE prices would not be so much higher on the West side compared to the East side. People that can afford dry sunny weather are willing to pay for it and the rest of us can have the wet jungle. Look at Southern California, people are still moving there just because of the weather, regardless of all of the other problems it has.

Always do what evers next.

[Spider Tim]

I know, it's absolutly insain, And I'm trying to flee it like a rat in a flood. To each their own, But to me, Myown

[Les C]

The vog around O'ahu was pretty bad today, hazy, but not smelly. My wife said that it woke her up in Volcano overnight because she had left a window open. While trying to find satellite imagery of the current vog conditions (anybody know of good URLs?), I came across these pages that has info about the wind currents that move the vog around the Big Island. Informative.

http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs169-97/

http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/MET/Faculty/...oster/vog/

There's an older satellite image on these pages.

[ArtM]

I haven't found anything that gives close-to-realtime images of the SO2 plume. However, you can visit the park's SO2 sensors here:

SO2 Conditions

If you click on the "More Data" tab, you can get a plot for Jaggar and the visitor center over the last 24 hours. If you click on the "Advisories" tab, you get a color coded chart of the advisory levels at each location.

ArtM

[Les C]

Yeah, I have that page bookmarked and have been checking it regularly since the evacuation advisory a couple weeks ago. I was looking for something that showed how the SO2 and/or vog tracks from the BI to O'ahu and Kaua'i.

On a tangent, anyone a fan of the now-ended HBO series, "The Wire"? In this last season, there was a scene where a newpaper reporter use a sentence like, "7 people were evacuated from the building that was on fire." The editors corrected her, saying that "evacuating people" means giving them an enema. It was a funny scene which brings a laugh when I see it used in the papers these days, except for the fact that it's SO2 fumes that are threatening us.

[Shekelpal]

Hey, get this, I had to go to Pittsburgh to get some fresh air. Here taking care of my Mom and realizing that for the first time in many months I have my old energy back, I can breath without choking, and think clearly (to whatever extent that may be). Without strong trades, the local surface winds are so variable in Puna that they can be coming from one direction in HPP and another in HSRE and visa versa. The plume can be seen by going to the USGS website Volcano Observatory, Halema‘uma‘u webcam. Updated every 15 minutes. http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/kilauea/update/images.html

Unless the trades are blowing really strong, which seems a rarity, at least as far south as Puna, these days, the smoke just settles over the island chain. From the plane, I could see the haze was covering a wide area.

[Guest]

*bump*

Just found this cool site that monitors Air Quality in Hawaii as well as the rest of the nation.

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