Climate and Ag in the news
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December 1st is the first day of meteorological or climatological winter (I guess depending on whether you are a meteorologist or a climatologist). You might wonder why it does not correspond with the astronomical season of winter, which is related to earth-sun geometry and starts this year on December 21. Here is a good article…
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November 30 marks the end of the Atlantic Tropical Season, one of our biggest weather-makers in the summer months. This year was a strange one, with a long period of no activity at all from the beginning of July through a good part of August. In spite of that, however, we saw a lot of…
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Hunger stones are an interesting marker of drought in Europe. In the past, when river levels dropped to very low levels, those conditions were marked by inscriptions on rocks that only appeared above the water when levels were low. In the recent drought, many of these inscriptions on so-called “hunger stones” have reappeared, showing just…
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In this blog I often write about the damage caused by tropical storm such as Irma, Michael, and Ian. But I don’t often see stories about how the affected farmers are recovering from their losses. Here is a Southeast Farm Press story about the Bahamas that makes me feel very good about the role that…
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I came to Georgia from the Midwest, and one of the things I had to learn about once I got here was what the crops and the growing conditions were like. One of those crops is cotton, one of the biggest agricultural products in the South. This article was written by Campbell Vaughn, UGA Extension…
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Today is the 250th anniversary of the birth of Luke Howard, a pharmacist and amateur meteorologist who proposed the cloud classification scheme that is still in use today, 220 years later. In his honor, several meteorological agencies have posted stories about how to classify clouds based on information regarding how they look and how high…
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Hurricane Ian caused a lot of agricultural damage to central Florida when it crossed the peninsula earlier this year. The biggest damage was to citrus, but many vegetable crops also took a hit. Clint Thompson discussed the resulting loss in tomato supply due to the winds knocking off tomatoes and flowers from the plants in…