Climate and Ag in the news
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It rained here in Georgia today. Not that unusual except that the rain came in from the southeast, which is not what we usually expect. The culprit is a tropical system, not organized enough to be named but carrying plenty of moisture with it, that has been drenching the Miami area today. (You can see…
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Almost everyone has seen radar images of precipitation on television or online in the past and knows at least a little about how to interpret them. While many television stations have their own low-power radars, the majority of weather radar images come from the National Weather Service. But their radar images come in two ways…
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As a meteorologist I often roll my eyes when I hear comments about weather models always being wrong. In fact, most of them are very good, but even the best aren’t perfect, because there are inherent errors in input data, simplifications of atmospheric processes like precipitation formation which happen on small scales, computing errors due…
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The official NOAA forecast for the 2020 Atlantic Hurricane Season was released today. It’s no surprise that they predicted a 60 percent chance of an more active than average season, because four other groups have already predicted the same. The lack of an El Nino coupled with above-average ocean surface temperatures and being on the…
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You may have seen some videos and photos of flooding in northeastern Michigan over the last couple of days. Heavy rain there caused two dams to fail, raising water levels downstream by as much as 9 feet and causing 10,000 residents to evacuate. One of the dams had been declared unsafe by inspectors in 2018…
Posted in: Climate and Ag in the news -
I ran across an article this week in the Metropolitan Planning Council newsletter out of Chicago which discussed how rainstorms are now producing more rain than they have in the past. The article is here. They talk about how 100-year rain events now have more rain than in the past in their area. For example,…
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When I was applying to graduate schools a long time ago, I visited the University of Chicago and met one of the world’s most famous tornado researchers, Dr. Ted Fujita. Even though I did not go to school there, I remained in awe of his amazing research on how tornadoes form and move. So I…