00:00Hawaii is under a state of emergency because of a really high-impact flood event that's in progress.
00:06We've got a few more days of this.
00:08This is driven by a Kona low.
00:10What is a Kona low?
00:11We're talking about an almost stationary zone of low pressure, a strong one.
00:16It's not sitting over the islands.
00:17It's west of the islands, but that in tandem with strong high pressure off to the east,
00:22which is really off the bat.
00:23They're working together to drive this flow of tropical moisture right up into the islands.
00:29And this is bringing some tremendous rainfall amounts.
00:32Early in the event here, we're up to 8 to 13 inches of rain.
00:36Mount Wealiali, a place notorious for excessive rainfall, one of the wettest places on Earth.
00:41Well, just since midweek, we've had 13 inches of rain.
00:43But other areas that are a little less prone to significant rain on the southwest side of some of these
00:48islands,
00:48typically on the drier side, you're getting into the flooding as well.
00:51So you can see it's not just rain, but also winter storm warnings on the summits.
00:55Yes, it does snow in Hawaii, up on top of the volcanoes there on the Big Island.
00:59Winter storm warnings in effect.
01:00Extreme wind out there.
01:01There will be gusts of wind up to around 100 miles per hour in the highest elevations.
01:07High wind warnings for even the low elevations all the way down to the coastline for the central and western
01:11islands.
01:12So tremendous amounts of rainfall, an unyielding flow here.
01:16It's an atmospheric river event hammering much of the central Hawaiian islands through the weekend with widespread flash flooding, damaging
01:24winds.
01:25And if we look at the atmospheric moisture content, a map we often show you when we're talking about hurricanes
01:29and tropical systems,
01:30you can see it's just a really persistent flow of high, high octane moisture right across the island.
01:37So what's that do for us?
01:38It dumps flooding rain.
01:40Some areas are already over a foot at Mount Waialiali, but some areas will end up with well over a
01:46foot in areas that don't typically see this amount of rain.
01:49So this continues right through the weekend.
01:51Dangerous flood situation in Hawaii.
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