Puna Weather
Sunday 16th August 2026
The center of hurricane Lala is just south of South Point and headed mostly north recently, but will soon turn to the northwest. There is a small chance that the core of the storm could pass over HOVE before turning a little to the west.
An upper level trough to our north is placing southerly shear over Lala and you can clearly see all the upper level moisture being accelerated to the north and directly over our island. These upper level winds are providing ventilation for convective bands that are rotating around Lala. This is providing a long line of heavy storms coming ashore from Kapoho to Hilo. This pattern could hold for several more hours. This is a lot of rain, even for our island. Scenes from Hilo are like nothing I've seen before.
I'm not seeing super high winds or any more than isolated lightning, just a lot of strong winds and wind damage is the product of two variables: speed and duration. While wind speed reports are lower than Iselle, the duration is long and with all the rain I expect outages will be widespread and fairly long lasting.
Tomorrow our winds are from the south and that means hot and humid with the possiblity of more heavy rain.
Monday's likely to be more of a transition day and I'm hoping for more normal conditions by Tuesday with moderate easterly trade winds, less humidity, but still scattered showers.
