Pam Knox
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A few months ago I shared a photo of pink flowers filling the Atacama Desert in Chile, a rare event caused by unusual rains in the region most likely linked to El Niño. Today you might enjoy a video of the wildflowers that are blooming in Death Valley due to the El Niño rains that…
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If you are old like me and have lived in the Southeast for most of your life, you may remember the snowstorm that occurred across much of the Southeast in February 1973. Some areas of Georgia and South Carolina received more than 18 inches in the storm, which occurred from February 9 to 11. The…
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As part of the celebration of the International Year of Soil, the New York Times published an article this week on the value of planting cover crops between regular harvests. Among the benefits: increase in soil carbon, decrease in erosion, reduction in compaction, lower fertilizer costs, and improvement in crop yields. And as I’ve pointed…
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Chris Robbins’ blog at iWeatherNet.com noted that today is the birthday of the National Weather Service. Here is how his entry begins: “The Weather Bureau, now known as the National Weather Service, was established on February 9, 1870 by the 41stUnited States Congress and signed by President Ulysses S. Grant. On March 29, 1870, the…
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There have been a number of articles published lately on the impacts of warming temperatures that are already being observed on different animal species. Yesterday I published a blog article on the impacts on ocean species. Today I will focus on the impacts of changing climate on chickens and livestock and on cats and dogs.…
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NOAA released their summary of climate conditions for January 2016 this morning. You can read the summary at https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/summary-info/national/201601, with a link to the full report coming out later this week. They noted that this is the lowest amount of drought in the contiguous US since 2010.
Posted in: Climate summaries -
I read an essay this weekend on a farmer and his wife in a tiny village in south India and how their lives and farming are affected by the rain there. It was a poetic description of how small farmers are intimately connected with the atmosphere and depend on it to provide the water they…
Posted in: Climate and Ag in the news