Starting July 1, Hawaiʻi residents will be able to get free, one-page climate checkups tailored right down to their island, watershed, or neighborhood, courtesy of a new University of Hawaiʻi tool. The monthly email snapshots roll rainfall, temperature, and drought data into a single digest aimed at land managers, agencies, and anyone who wants to know how dry their own corner of the islands is getting. The launch lands in the middle of a very dry 2025 and the onset of El Niño conditions that could shake up rainfall patterns statewide.
Subscribers can choose their scale, from a statewide overview to traditional Hawaiian divisions such as moku and ahupuaʻa or standard watershed boundaries, then have the update delivered directly to their inbox each month. To sign up or preview the dashboards, residents are being directed to the Hawaiʻi Climate Data Portal’s Climate Summary page, according to Maui News.
How the portal works
The new summaries build on UH’s existing Climate Portfolio and Hawaiʻi Mesonet projects. Users can select or sketch out an area of interest, and the portal automatically compiles a tailored climate portfolio and emails it out. The Mesonet, a growing network of weather stations across the islands, feeds gridded datasets and near-real-time observations into the system so the reports mirror local conditions as closely as possible. As described by the University of Hawaiʻi, the team added automation after demand for custom reports grew faster than they could keep up with by hand.
Funding and finish line
Getting the monthly summary feature across the finish line took a patchwork of funding and some persistence. Initial support came from NOAA’s National Integrated Drought Information System, but that grant was canceled in December 2025. State funding from the Commission on Water Resource Management, along with other grants, kept the work alive, and the portal’s cyberinfrastructure was backed by the NSF EPSCoR Change Hawaiʻi program. “We were too far along to stop,” HCDP director Ryan Longman said in the project release, as reported by Maui News.
Why this matters now
The portal’s own 2025 Annual Climate Summary flags 2025 as one of Hawaiʻi’s driest recent years, with large swaths of the state listed as abnormally dry or worse, which highlights the need for fine-scaled monitoring. The Hawaiʻi Climate Data Portal’s report and tools now feature datasets such as Standardized Precipitation Index maps and a Wildfire Potential Index to show both short-term and long-term drought conditions and fire risk, according to the Hawaiʻi Climate Data Portal annual summary. Forecasts from NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center add another layer of concern: the agency issued an El Niño Advisory for the Pacific in June 2026 and expects conditions to strengthen into the 2026–27 winter, which can reshape rainfall and drought risks for the islands, and the CPC discussion lays out those details.
Residents who want the monthly summaries can enter their email on the Climate Summary page or contact the HCDP team at [email protected] for more information. The reports are designed to give communities a sharper local view of rainfall, temperature, and drought so choices about water, grazing, and fire preparedness lean on data instead of guesswork.
