January 2015
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It’s no secret that many areas of Africa have seriously degraded soil due to overuse as well as erosion and desertification. And yet food production needs to increase by 70 percent by 2050 to feed the growing population in that area. A report this month published in The Guardian (link) describes a management technique called Integrated…
Posted in: Climate and Ag in the news -
The next round of rain should enter the Southeast late Saturday night into Sunday. Most of the day on Sunday should be fairly wet, depending on where you are, with amounts of 1/2 to 1 inch in most areas. That system will exit the Southeast on Monday as a cold front moves through the region…
Posted in: Climate outlooks -
A new GIS-based data viewer for normals is now available from the National Climatic Data Center. You can visit it at https://gis.ncdc.noaa.gov/map/viewer/#app=clim&cfg=cdo&theme=normals&layers=01&node=gis&extent=-149.3:20.2:-60.1:69.6&custom=normals The viewer allows you to choose a variety of normals options for National Weather Service cooperative stations around the country. A screen shot is shown below.
Posted in: Sources of weather and climate data -
This week there have been a number of stories on attitudes about climate change and global warming in the news. Since many of you communicate about weather and climate impacts on agriculture to people with a broad variety of perspectives, I wanted to point out some stories that might be helpful in setting the debate…
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Recently NASA released a mesmerizing video of the movement of aerosols around the globe. You can watch the video and read a brief description here at onEarth.org. Aerosols can occur naturally (sea salt particles, pollen) but many are caused by burning of forests or output from manufacturing. On the video you can see how aerosols move…
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Slate magazine’s website had an ominous article today about the drought in California, which has gotten even worse in recent weeks after a wet start to the winter. Last year California’s temperature was more than 2 degrees higher than the previous record due in part to the drought, and this month some parts of the…
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A recent article on Craftsmanship.net describes the work that is being done by California ranchers to improve carbon storage in the soil of his pastures using judicious application of compost to the land. This has often been discussed but no carefully calibrated studies to determine the effectiveness of the treatment have been performed. If the…