June 2018
-
At last we are seeing some dry days in the Southeast, and I am sure that farmers are working overtime to catch up on work as soon as they can get into their fields. Here are a couple more stories about rain impacts on crops from Southeast Farm Press, Vegetable and Specialty Crop News and Southeast…
-
A new study in Nature this week showed results of research on the forward speed of hurricanes and how it has changed over time. A rough rule of thumb for the amount of rain dropped by a tropical system is to take 100 and divide it by the forward speed in miles per hour to…
-
According to the monthly summary for the US for May 2018, released today by NOAA, this past May was the warmest on record for the lower 48 states, beating the previous record from 1934 by more than half a degree. The warm temperatures were especially driven by warm nighttime temperatures. It was the wettest May…
Posted in: Climate summaries -
Every year a little more farmland is converted to development. In some areas, the conversion is a bit more rapid. This map from Modern Farmer shows how much land has been converted from farmland to urban uses between 1992 and 2012. Note how much of the Southeast is being converted, especially in areas surrounding big…
Posted in: Climate and Ag in the news -
National Public Radio has an interesting story this week about recent impacts of rising sea level on one of the oldest farms in the US. The farm is located in the Eastern Shore of Maryland and was started by land grant in 1666, long before the US was even a country. Now rising sea levels…
-
Since we are just starting out our 2018 hurricane season, now is the time to think about how you are going to handle this year’s potential tropical events. Here is a good article from AZFamily on five lessons that we learned from last year’s storms. While we are not expecting quite so active a season…
-
After a cold March and April, the state of Georgia rebounded in May with well above-normal temperatures for almost all of the state. May started out very dry but in the second half of the month, rain fell almost every day at many locations, leading to precipitation totals well above normal. This was aided by…