Hurricane Lala · Hawaiʻi, August 2026

Hurricane Lala 2026

Storm impact replay for Hawaiʻi

Lala came through the islands in August 2026. This page replays what the instruments recorded, hour by hour, on one clock: rain gauges, stream gauges, wave buoys, tide gauges, the best track, and utility outage reports.

How to use

• Drag the timeline or press play. Every marker and chart moves to that hour.
• Rain gauges — colour and size are rainfall, either storm total or the rate for the hour on the clock. Switch under Layers.
• Stream gauges — fill is flood stage where USGS publishes one, otherwise that gauge's flow as a share of its own storm peak. Tap one to load its hydrograph.
• Storm track — dashed is the whole path, solid is the part already travelled. Dots are 6-hourly best-track fixes, coloured by the scale below.
• Wind field — rings show how far 34, 50 and 64 kt winds reached, which is why an eye passing offshore still floods the coast.
• Waves & surge — buoys scale with significant wave height, tide gauges with surge above the predicted tide.

Storm scale

Saffir-Simpson categories, by 1-minute sustained wind. These are speeds at sea, not what any given place on land felt.

Data sources

• Rain — HCDP Hawaiʻi Mesonet (site, csv)
• Streams — USGS NWIS (site, json)
• Track — NHC/CPHC best track (atcf, json)
• Outages — HECO and KIUC advisories (json)
• Coast — NDBC buoys and NOAA CO-OPS tide gauges (json)
• Imagery — NASA GIBS: GOES-West, VIIRS, IMERG

Important caveats

• Outage counts are snapshots, not a feed. Utilities publish figures when they publish them, so the curve between points is drawn, not measured.
• IMERG runs about a day behind. The layer drops out rather than paint stale rain onto a later hour.
• Wind radii are reported per fix, every 6 hours, and are held until the next one. The rings step rather than breathe.
• Gauges fail in storms. Gaps in a series are gaps in the record, not zeros.

Full method notes: METHODS.md

Built for Hawaiʻi storm response by Supersistence