Climate and Ag in the news
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As I was driving in to work this morning, I noticed that the peach trees are blooming at the UGA Horticulture Farm in Watkinsville GA. Not a big surprise considering the cold winter, which provided adequate chill hours for many varieties, and the extremely warm conditions which have occurred in the region for the last…
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Atlas Obscura has a fascinating look at an unusual weather phenomenon–holes in the fog cover that occur over cities in India. A recent study was originally done to see how pollution in those cities affected the formation of fog. But what scientists noticed was that holes in the fog banks occurred in winter as viewed…
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UF/IFAS announced that a new tool which cattle ranchers can use to determine appropriate hay and supplement needs for their cattle in winter is now available. The tool uses an spreadsheet approach with farmer inputs like animal weight, whether she is lactating, and the quality of the base hay to determine the correct supplements to…
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The latest blog post on Climate.gov discusses a phenomenon called the Madden-Julian Oscillation, which is basically ab atmospheric wave pattern that moves along the equator from west to east, taking 30 to 60 days go all of the way around the globe. The MJO interacts with other weather patterns like ENSO to affect the weather…
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The Southeast Farm Press reported this week that a new carrot farming operation is coming to the Southeast. According to the story, “Carrots thrive in sandy, loamy soils in California. The same soil type is prevalent in south Georgia and Florida. The soil, combined with a climate of 75-degree to 85-degree days, and nights between…
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While we’ve been suffering under May-like conditions in the East (if you can call this suffering), California has seen extremely cold temperatures, including frost in some areas that don’t often get it. So farmers have been busy running wind machines and other frost protection to keep their citrus fruit from freezing. Temperatures got into the…
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In trying to keep up with current climate science, I often run across articles that I think are interesting or challenging. Here are a few of the articles that have caught my eye in recent weeks. Cosmos magazine describes an counterintuitive impact of a warming climate at the end of the last Ice Age–a temporary…