Climate and Ag in the news
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The CoCoRaHS blog this week has a good description of how recent rains in California have affected the drought there. While northern California is now drought-free, southern California is still in drought, with a few areas even still in exceptional drought. You can read the blog at https://cocorahs.blogspot.com/2017/01/no-such-thing-as-free-lunch.html.
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AgWeb reprinted a story from Bloomberg News this week describing some troubling results of a study by researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the University of Chicago. The study shows that with the warmer temperatures expected from global warming, yields of corn and soybeans could drop significantly. According to the article,…
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Meteorologists use Doppler radar to track precipitation across the country. It provides not only information about falling rain and snow, but also a sense of the direction of the winds, which can help provide information about potential severe weather such as tornadoes. But Doppler radar can also track other things in the sky, such as…
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What’s your favorite kind of weather? What temperatures do you like best? While there is likely to be a range of values in your group of friends, scientists generally define “mild” weather as temperatures between 64 and 86 degrees F, with less than a half inch of rain and dew points below 68 degrees F, indicative…
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USA Today reported earlier this week that in all 2016 had only 17 tornado deaths during the year. This is the lowest in 30 years and the second lowest since accurate records began in 1950. The lowest year was 1986 with 16 deaths. One of the reasons this year was so low was that there…
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Back in 2016 the weather station at Mount Mitchell in North Carolina reported that they had received 41 inches of snow in a single 24-hour period. If that had been correct, it would have been a new record for the state. But a committee of state weather experts examined the observation and determined that it…
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A new map based on research recently published in Geophysical Research Letters shows that most of the northern US is increasing in susceptibility to flooding based on trends in water tables. In the South and Southeast, recent droughts have lowered water tables and stream flows, reducing their likelihood of flooding. You can read more about…