Pam Knox

  • Mostly dry week ahead

    With the current weather pattern locked in place, high pressure will dominate most of our region for the next week.  This means little chance of precipitation falling, and most areas will get less than a quarter of an inch for the week.  Most of that is likely to fall late in the week as the…

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  • What goes up must come down?

    NOAA’s latest El Niño blog post indicates that not only are we still in a strong El Niño but that they have also issued a La Niña watch for the next few months.  I’ve been talking about the possibility of swinging from one extreme to the other in the past few months, and now it…

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  • I’ve been attending the Southeast Coastal Community of Practice meeting this week at Tybee Island GA.  Yesterday we had the chance to visit the new installation of a “living shoreline” at the Ben Burton 4-H camp nearby.  This allows a more natural form of protection to prevent coastal erosion from rising sea levels than a…

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  • The Packer posted a story this week about delays in harvesting of blueberries from Florida and Georgia as well as frost in North Carolina that may reduce volumes this year.  At the same time, California’s yields are doing well due to ideal weather.  The combination of these conditions may lead to a lower than usual…

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  • AgWeb posted a story this week on the negative impacts of El Niño on cattle herds in South Africa.  Drought related to the phenomenon has reduced pastures and caused producers to eliminate cattle from their herds.  The extra beef produced has resulted in a drop in prices which have negatively impacted beef producers in many…

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  • As you know from previous posts, El Niño can cause a variety of climate anomalies across the globe.  A story today from AgWeb highlights the hot conditions in Brazil in recent weeks and its impacts on Brazil’s corn crop, which is often planted as a second crop behind soybeans. In the map below of global El…

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  • The Progressive Dairyman published an article last month on the impacts of a changing climate on animal production.  It was written by Tamara Scully and based on a dairy conference I spoke at with a number of other experst in Ithaca NY last summer.  It describes how changes in temperature, rainfall, growing season length, and…

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