July 2019

  • A story in Morning Ag Clips earlier this week discussed the increasing combination of solar power generation and agriculture by some US farmers. The practice of co-locating the two by planting crops under the shade of solar panels is called agrivoltaics. Underneath the solar panels, cooler and moisture conditions can reduce stress on crops and…

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  • Yale Climate Connections has an interesting story about the importance of the Great Smoky Mountains cloud cover on maintaining the local climate through balancing incoming and outgoing energy. Cloud forests at the tops of the ridges are maintained by dense clouds of microscopic water droplets and other areas benefit from the cloudy and moist conditions…

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  • Here is an interesting column published this week in AgWeb which discusses how this year’s crazy weather will impact farmers and their management choices in future years. Farmers will no longer be able to just do “business as usual” as far as planning for planting goes, and will need to consider using cover crops and…

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  • The latest forecasts for northern Georgia and surrounding areas show that scattered showers similar to what we are seeing today are expected to continue across the region for most of the next two weeks. These summer storms are very typical for late summer and because they are so scattered, getting rain from them (or conversely,…

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  • The Cloud Appreciation Society (https://cloudappreciationsociety.org/)is one of my favorite sites for viewing spectacular images of clouds. Here is a great story from Reuters about the society and how our views of clouds are changing our views of how the climate is changing. Clouds are one of the most important and not well understood influences on…

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  • The latest 7-day QPF map shows little rain in the next week for most of the Southeast with the exception of the Florida peninsula and some of eastern NC. Most of whatever rain does fall in the region will be late in the week on Thursday and Friday. Temperatures will be rising from the cool…

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  • The latest Drought Monitor, released this morning, shows only small changes to the drought across the Southeast this week. The biggest change is a slight expansion of severe drought in Alabama, while the D2 drought is almost entirely gone from Georgia now. Most of the region will be fairly dry in the next week except…

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