Sunday, February 7, 2021. Itʻs so very Invigorating!!!

 Consciousness achieved, eyes tentatively open, roll over...faint birdsong, condensation on windows, bluesky, goldenlight caught in tops of ʻōhiʻa.  Then the brrrr when getting out of cozy bed...no wonder!!!  44dF at 730 this morning, though certainly nowhere close to a record.  I remember 27dF and windshield ice a February morning in mid-80s.  But still yet...C O L D...

Snow on nā mauna, our beloved Maunaloa and Maunakea, the work of Poliʻahu, elemental whose kuleana is hau...snow.  Clear skies mean no insulating blanket of cloud, plus a healthy dose of snow, plus kehau, the breeze at night coming from the summits, so very invigorating!  From the Gemini telescope webcam:

And, here on Kīlauea, Pelehonuamea is invigorated too.  Iʻll let you folks google and read about Pele vs Poliʻahu rivalries, but yesterday, I was ocd-ing, watching Tilt go down, down, down, and the loko ahi get "cooler" and less active (itʻs all relative).

Above, that uptick just before 6p...and the three thermal images, especially the third, illustrating more and more cooler purples...

Then today, as Sheʻs been seen more frequently of late:

A refresher:  when looking at the Tilt graphs, please note, with care, the numbers on the two axes. Left-hand side (Y-axis) are microradians, and the bottom (X-axis) are the dates and times.  Remember?  For me was high school.  Today, the kids learn in elementary school.

The thing with graphs, depending on the scale(s) used, they can appear to present very different information.  That spectacularly large climbing hump on the right of the first image

depicts the same thing as the little uptick on the graph below.  Gotta PayAttention, lest you be alarmed.

The graphs depict those Deflation-Inflation (D-I) Events I shared a few days ago.  It seems that no one really knows what causes them, but they do chart movements of the surface of the ʻāina, the ground.  Me?  I like to think of the up-down as Pele breathing...inhale, exhale...

So yesterday, the loko ahi was measured at 692 feet deep, and this morning itʻs 702 feet deep.  Seems a relatively substantial increase, that 10 feet.  But instruments are instruments...laser range finders apparently measure a point on the floor.  If that point is higher than the average surface because of a wave rolling across the lake, or a high point on a just-crusted fresh lobe of pele, or if inflation caused the entire surface to rise, then precision instruments are often able to detect those +/- changes.  OK?

And again, itʻs pepeʻe time.

Kinda junk the picture, but that tight cluster of furry goldenness in the middle are pepeʻe hāpuʻu.  Tightly coiled fiddleheads, slowly expanding, growing, and unfurling, as we anticipate a fresh brilliant green understory.  Itʻs that time of year...

Into the sun!  Have an excellent week.

As always, with aloha,

BobbyC

maniniowali@gmail.com