Climate and Ag in the news
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By the time you read this on Monday morning, the Oroville Dam in California, holding back the second biggest reservoir in the state, may have been washed out. As of Sunday night, there are flash flood warnings due to an imminent collapse of the auxiliary spillway for low-lying areas downstream of the dam. While the…
Posted in: Climate and Ag in the news -
Climatologists know that the most likely place to first see the impacts of a warmer world is in the Arctic, where feedbacks due to snow and sea ice and their effect on the albedo make climate very sensitive to small temperature variations. Albedo is the reflectivity of the earth’s surface, and snow and ice are…
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The latest WunderBlog post updates us on the status of Arctic sea ice. The bad news is that it is at a new record low for this time of year, even though it’s winter in the Arctic now. Temperatures there this winter have been incredibly warm, which has helped lead to the low ice coverage. (See…
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According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, former President Jimmy Carter is doing a new kind of farming these days. He has recently leased a field used in the past to grow soybeans as a solar power facility. The field of solar collectors, which turn to track the sun, will be able to power approximately 215 homes. …
Posted in: Climate and Ag in the news -
I gave a talk on projections of future climate today to a group of farmers and other interested folk in LaGrange, GA. One of the things we discussed in the talk is how weather and climate forecasts are similar and how they are different, because they are really designed to do different things even though…
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According to the USA-NPN’s Spring Indices, spring is arriving 20 days earlier than a long-term average (1981-2010) in much of the Southeastern US. The Extended Spring Indices are models that predict the onset of early spring plants across the United States. You can see these maps as well as maps of Accumulated Growing Degree Days…
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Earlier this month NASA published a study showing that 1/3 of big groundwater basins across the earth were in distress. One of them was what they list as the Atlantic and Gulf Coastal Plains aquifer, which provides irrigation and drinking water to a large area of south Georgia, Alabama, Florida and other states around the Gulf…