Climate and Ag in the news
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One of the more unusual stories this week was the report that respiratory distress linked to thunderstorms in Melbourne, Australia, caused thousands of asthma attacks and four deaths earlier this week. You can read more about it in the Capital Weather Gang here. The culprit was grass pollen which was concentrated ahead of the storm…
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In place of Black Friday I am offering a White Friday instead. Here is a fantastic picture of a rare fogbow from Scotland which is making the rounds of my Facebook feed today. You can read about what makes a fogbow or white rainbow at Yahoo here. If that’s not enough of the white stuff,…
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Wildfires are still raging across the Southeast. You can see a recent satellite picture at EarthSky at https://earthsky.org/earth/southeastern-us-wildfires-tennessee-northcarolina-southcarolina-georgia-nov2016. Some areas are so smoke-filled and potentially hazardous that people have been evacuated, for example in Rabun County GA according to WGAU here and the Atlanta Journal Constitution here. Eos.org reported this week on some research being done on…
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While many parts of the Southeast are in very bad drought conditions, we are not the only place in the US that is being affected by drought. The drought in the Northeast, fortunately, seems to be waning as they go into the winter wet season. In northern California, El Niño rains last year put a…
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The University of Minnesota Institute on the Environment issued a new map showing global emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane due to crop and food production this week. According to the map, much of the inland Southeast is relatively low in GHG emissions. Florida and the coastal plains, however, put off…
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The Southeast Farm Press posted a story today about the negative impacts of the exceptional Southeast drought on the timber industry in Alabama (although the comments are generally true for the rest of the Southeast as well). It points out that the drought and fires will have take a severe toll on forests this year…
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While the official hurricane season is almost over, it’s not too late for a tropical storm to develop. And today we have TS Otto in the Caribbean Sea, a newly formed storm which may become a hurricane before it makes landfall straight west in Central America. You can read more about it at Weather Underground…