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 — color and size are rainfall, either the storm total so far or the rate for the hour on the clock.
• Wind gusts — an arrow at each of the 72 stations with an anemometer, pointing the way the wind was blowing and colored by gust speed for that hour.
• 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 traveled. Dots are 6-hourly best-track fixes, colored 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. This is the storm's structure as NHC estimated it, not a measurement. For measured wind use Wind gusts.
• 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 and wind gusts — HCDP Hawaiʻi Mesonet (site, csv, wind json). The gauges measure both; gusts are WG_1_Max, direction WDrs_1_Avg.
• 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 — hourly GOES-West, three bands: GeoColor and clean infrared from NASA GIBS, Sandwich from NOAA STAR. The STAR sector ships with no geo-bounds, so its extent was fitted against the coastline it draws — see METHODS for the residual

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.
• 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 — 13 of the 77 rain gauges have them, and one on Lānaʻi reported only 43 of the 176 hours. A gauge popup says how many hours it reported when that is not all of them, and the statewide rain rate divides by the gauges reporting each hour, not by all 77.
• USGS stream values are provisional and get revised, sometimes substantially, after the event. Flood categories here are this page comparing that provisional stage to NWS thresholds — they are not an official flood determination.
• Surge is observed minus predicted tide, computed here. It is not an official NOAA surge product.
• Nothing on this page is for life-safety decisions. For warnings, evacuations and road closures use NWS Honolulu and your county emergency management agency.

Definitions, derivations and caveats are recorded in the project's METHODS.md.

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