Climate and Ag in the news
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Last month I attended a workshop on the US Drought Monitor and presented a talk on recent flash droughts in the Southeast. There were a variety of different talks relating to drought in our region and how the impacts are not always caught in the Drought Monitor because of how it is put together. All…
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As temperatures warm up across the globe, crops are being affected in different ways. Wine grapes are very sensitive to local variations in temperature, and with warmer temperatures the varieties of grapes that can be grown may change to varieties that are less useful for wine production. Here are several stories about the impacts of…
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I have spent the last two days driving through southwestern Georgia, where rivers are flooding and the damage from Hurricane Michael is still visible all around that part of the state. After seeing all of the evidence of extreme weather and the horrific pictures of the damage caused by the Nashville tornado earlier this week,…
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Farmers face many threats from the environment, from pests and diseases to extreme weather. The Daily Tar Heel described some of the new challenges agricultural producers are facing from the changing climate and how it is affecting their blueberries and other crops in this article posted last week. Farmers in other Southeastern states will understand…
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In the Southeast, changes in land use from bare ground croplands to forests are thought to be one of the contributing factors to the cooling that Georgia and other Southeastern states saw in the period from roughly the 1940’s to the 1970’s. Now a similar land use change in western Europe is leading to cooler…
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One of the oddest stories of this past winter coming out of Europe is that many areas that normally see a lot of cold and snow have seen almost no snow at all this year. In Finland, not a single snowflake was seen for the entire winter, which left some residents sad, not only because…
Posted in: Climate and Ag in the news -
I’ve started to get questions about whether or not we have seen our last frost for this spring after the warm winter we have just finished. However, it is still well before the average date of last spring frost for most parts of the region except for the Florida Peninsula, so climatologically it seems unlikely…