Puna Weather
Thursday 13th August 2026
Today through early Friday warm and humid with light to moderate easterly trade winds and widely scattered showers.
Late Friday through early Sunday possible storm conditions.
A likely center has early signs of forming near point at 14.7N 145.7W. If this isn't just a nighttime maximum, and we see continued organization around this area, the models would likely shift towards the north. What we're looking forward to is data from hurricane hunters. When that is fed into the models confidence will increase. That takes several to many hours depending on the timing, so we've got satellite and scatterometer data to work with.
In the most recent satellite loop we see all convection to the south diminish. There is now sustained convection to the west and north of this point, which is new because initially there was dry air off to the northwest. The storm has moistened the environment surrounding it. Now it has some degree of protection from the surrounding mid-level dry air.
There are sustained westerly winds south of the point, evident through the upper canopy in the shortwave loop. These could be evidence of a transient vortex (short lived low). The previous structure was bi-modal, with two lobes competing to be dominant, one in the north and the other in the south, both 100-200mi from the center. The NHC used the middle of the larger area as the center.
The models latched on to which ever lobe was dominant when the models initialized and this resulted in some variations in their forecast. What's different is now we see sustained convection to the west, north, and east that is only 50-100km away. As the storm contracts energy increases in the middle, helping to reinforce the center.
As I mentioned eariler storms driven by the warm waters tend to strengthen and consolidate right about now, late night, so the whole organization process could fall apart when the sun comes up. We'll see.
This point is farther north than the GFS and Euro started with 12 hours ago, when we saw them jog to the south. Now the storm is looking like where the NHC has been predicting, resulting in it passing over or very near our island.
Despite some outlier models that contain unrealistic physics, there is convergence in the storm being somewhere between tropical storm to CAT1 if it passes over us.
