February 2017

  • Last week I reported that the Oroville Dam in northern California was in danger of losing its capacity to hold back water from the reservoir there, the second biggest one in California, due to a damaged spillway and water overtopping the emergency overland spillway due to heavy rains in the area.  Hundreds of thousands of…

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  • WABE in Atlanta reported this week that the lack of chill hours this year is becoming a real concern to peach farmers in Georgia.  Most varieties need close to 1000 chill hours to set a good fruit crop.  Last year they had about 750 and the yields were down by 20 percent.  This year most…

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  • Today marks the anniversary of one of the Southeast’s biggest tornado outbreaks in history.   From This Day in Weather History’s Facebook post: “Severe thunderstorms spawned sixty tornadoes in the southeastern U.S., killing between 178 and 1200 people and causing three million dollars damage. Georgia and the Carolinas were the hardest hit by the tornado…

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  • Weather Underground posted a story today describing some of the non-precipitation things that have shown up on National Weather Service radars across the nation.  I’ve shared some of them before but you might be interested in seeing the full list.  You can see images and access the information at https://www.wunderground.com/news/radar-gaggle-geese-arkansas-iss?__prclt=FNouhSlu.

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  • For those of you who are trying to find climate data and can’t get a hold of me, NOAA has put together a handy web page which tells you how you can search through their multitude of data sets to find what you need.  You can read about the process and visit the starting page…

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  • The latest 7-day QPF forecast shows that most areas of the Southeast will receive less than half an inch of rain this week.  The driest areas will be in eastern North Carolina, where abnormally dry conditions were identified in the Drought Monitor this week, and could signal the beginnings of a drought there.  The wettest…

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  • With milder winters occurring in the last few years, there is a renewed interest in growing citrus in northern Florida and even up into Georgia.  In the last few years I have worked with some farmers starting to grow satsumas in southwest Georgia.  Once the trees are established, they can take temperatures down as low…

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