University of Hawaii unveils public portal for information on climate

There’s a powerful new tool for Hawaii researchers, resource managers, educators, students or anyone else trying to figure out what’s happening to the islands under the spell of climate change.

The Hawaii Climate Data Portal — set to go live today — is an open-source platform with easy public access to reams of climate data and information along with data products, climate tools, links and more.

More than a decade in the making, the portal is a project of the University of Hawaii’s Hawai‘i Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research ‘Ike Wai project and the Hawai‘i Data Science Institute, which have partnered with the Water Resources Research Center and the East-West Center.

The overarching goal, officials said, is to provide streamlined access to reliable, high-quality climate data and information for Hawaii. This includes the production of both near- real-time monthly rainfall and daily temperature maps, and a user-friendly tool to visualize and download them.

The effort is being presented in the same week the latest United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report warned of a dire future and a house on Sunset Beach fell into the ocean, a probable victim of sea-level rise.

“Folks need to start to adapt to the coming changes,” said Ryan Longman, a UH researcher, East-West Center fellow and a member of the Hawaii Climate Data Portal climate science team.

“I work with resource managers who are making decisions based on future projections and historical trends,” he said. “So I think there’s no better time than to think about the inevitable, which is a warmer world in the future.”

The portal is being introduced today in a Zoom call where up to 300 registered attendees will view a demonstration of the project’s capabilities, including its data visualization and download tool.

During a sneak preview, it took Longman about 30 seconds to create a color-coded rainfall map of Hawaii island during the peak of Hurricane Lane in 2018.

“Maybe there are three or four people in the state who could do this a month after the data was made available,” the researcher said. “Now my 7-year-old son can come in and make this thing in two minutes.”

Climate data available through the portal include 35,000 daily temperature maps, 1,440 monthly rainfall maps, 102 years of rainfall data and 32 years of temperature data.

Other features include a library of climate-related journal publications and reports, climate research highlights, information on Indigenous knowledge and climate perspectives, and links to relevant tools and resources across the state.

Longman said researchers especially are going to appreciate the new portal because it will allow them to focus more time on their analyses and less time on data collection and processing.

“This provides that huge first step of providing the actual data all at once — and quality-controlled,” he said.

In the near future, the portal will host data from UH’s Hawaii Mesonet project, which is planning to deploy more than 90 climate stations statewide in the next few years. The project is being funded by a three-year, $1.3 million grant from the National Science Foundation with the aim of better understanding and forecasting the weather and climate of the Hawaiian Islands.

Other portal features under development and supported by the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration include near-real-time fire risk and early warning, drought forecasting, and an avian malaria risk warning tool.

The Hawaii Climate Data Portal is located at hawaii.edu/climate-data-portal/team.