Hawaii reeling after Lala’s powerful sideswipe » Yale Climate Connections

by Bob Henson, Yale Climate Connections
August 17, 2026

Hurricane Lala delivered a double-barreled punch of torrential rain and high wind as it passed just south of Hawaii over the weekend. Lala’s track put the islands on the storm’s sprawling north side, where screaming easterly winds pushed upslope against Hawaii’s rugged terrain, dumping immense amounts of rain. Flash flooding has been widespread, and the rains and winds led to major power outages.

Lala reached hurricane strength just before its closest pass to South Point on the Island of Hawaii (aka the “Big Island”). Even though the storm’s northeastern eyewall briefly pushed ashore, Lala didn’t make an official landfall, because the center of the cloud-filled eye remained off the coast; it was about 30 miles southwest of South Point at its nearest approach around 6 p.m. HST Saturday, and at that point the eye was about 23 miles wide. This means the Island of Hawaii remains without any official record of a hurricane landfall, although Lala will go down as the closest thing to it for now.

As of 5 a.m. HST Monday (11 a.m. EDT), Tropical Storm Lala was centered about 280 miles (450 kilometers) west-southwest of Lihue, a community on Hawaii’s westernmost major island, Kauai. Dry mid-level air has taken a toll on Lala, but the storm continued to traverse warmer-than-average sea surface temperatures of 27–28 degrees Celsius (81–82 degrees Fahrenheit), as it cruised west at 12 mph (19 km/hr).

Strong wind shear of 10-20 knots will continue along Lala’s path for several days, but Lala’s sheer size may help insulate it. And as it encounters a moister atmosphere, Lala is predicted to regain hurricane status. In fact, models suggest Lala could make a run at Cat 2 or even Cat 3 strength as it passes through the most remote area of U.S. ecological protection in the tropical Pacific: the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument.

Shredded trees, flood-ravaged landscapes, power-grid failures

All state and county offices, schools, and courts were closed on Monday, and over 110,000 customers across the state remained without power as of early Monday afternoon (U.S. EDT), according to poweroutage.us. “Some customers in the hardest-hit rural areas are being asked to prepare for extended outages that could last weeks or even months,” said Hawaii News Now.

A rainfall summary map for Lala tweeted by the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center (see Fig. 2) could easily be mistaken for a topographic map, as it shows far higher totals on the eastern (windward) sides of Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea on the Island of Hawaii (the “Big Island”) versus the western (leeward) sides. The highest total reported as of late Sunday night was 43.54 inches at Laupahoehoe, a coastal town about 25 mi (40 km) northwest of Hilo. Even larger amounts may have fallen along the eastern slopes, which are among the wettest places on Earth. According to Michael Lowry, Lala will likely go down as one of the top 10 wettest tropical cyclones on record for the U.S. and perhaps the third-wettest to affect Hawaii, only behind Lane in 2018 and Hiki in 1950, which brought rainfall totals of 58 inches and 52 inches, respectively.

Lala’s winds were something to behold at the high peaks of Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea, where the storm became one of the few hurricanes in which cameras have captured snow falling! The peak gust reported from the National Weather Service was a mind-blowing 140 mph (225 km/hr) at the summit of Mauna Kea (elevation 13,803 feet or 4,207 meters).

Winds gusted to 70-90 mph on the Big Island and 74 mph and 85 mph, respectively, on Maui and Oahu, as the center of Lala slid about 60 to 75 miles to their south on Saturday local time. Below are a few of the peak sustained winds and peak gusts reported in hourly data from airport weather stations around Hawaii. Within this group of stations, all at close to sea level, tropical-storm-force sustained winds (39 mph or higher) were observed only at Kailua/Kona, and even there just at one hourly report. However, gusts topped out at all airports in the range of 45-75 mph (72-121 km/hr), which can be more than enough to topple trees and power lines.

Hilo, Hawaii: Sustained up to 26 mph (42 km/hr) with gusts to 56 mph (90 km/hr)
Kailua/Kona, Hawaii: Sustained up to 52 mph (84 km/hr) with gusts to 71 mph (114 km/hr)
Honolulu, Oahu: Sustained up to 33 mph (53 km/hr) with gusts to 47 mph (76 km/hr)
Kahului, Maui: Sustained up to 36 mph (58 km/hr) with gusts to 60 mph (97 km/hr)

Elsewhere in the tropics: A pause in named storms

It’s not every year that both the western Pacific and the Atlantic are bereft of named storms in mid-August, but that was the case on Monday, August 17, 2026. A couple of areas of potential interest exist in both the western and eastern Pacific, but they’re all at least several days away from taking shape. The most significant future threat appears to be Invest 92W, located well east of the Northern Mariana Islands, which the European and GFS models predict will become a powerful major typhoon by this weekend.

Meanwhile, strong wind shear and waters that are a touch cooler than average for mid-August continue to keep the environment hostile for development across the Caribbean and open Atlantic. On average (based on 1991-2020 statistics), the Atlantic’s first hurricane arrives on August 11 and the fourth tropical storm on August 15. But this year has only produced three tropical storms, none of them particularly strong. And as of Monday, the National Hurricane Center was projecting no new systems for at least the next week.

If you had no way of knowing, you might suspect based on this whisper-quiet Atlantic that El Niño was in place — and you’d have been right on target. This isn’t just any El Niño event, either. On August 13, the NWS Climate Prediction Center reported in its monthly ENSO summary that the unfolding El Niño was just 0.1°C away from the “strong” category, defined as Niño 3.4 sea surface temperatures of at least 1.5°C above average after adjustment for overall tropical warming through the Relative Oceanic Niño Index, or RONI. The rolling three-month average for RONI jumped from 0 for March-April-May to 1 for May-June-July; that’s a faster strengthening across those months than for any other El Niño event in 76 years of NOAA data.

The NWS Climate Prediction Center now gives greater-than-90% odds that a “very strong” event (at least 2°C above average) is on its way. Even more startling, the center said (with boldface added here by YCC): “During the October-December 2026 season, there is a 69% chance of a historic event that would exceed the strength of previous El Niño events dating back to 1950 (+2.5°C or more for a 3-month RONI value).”

Jeff Masters and Irene Sans contributed to this post.

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