Climate and Ag in the news
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AgWeb posted an article this week on the impacts of the continuing California drought on dairies in the region. Competition for scarce water has led to fallowed crops and higher costs for irrigation. A shift to permanent crops like nut trees has also removed acreage once used to produce feed for dairy cattle. Dropping milk prices…
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Even though it’s too cold to do agriculture in Antarctica, I am still interested in the weather and climate there. On Friday Dr. Jeff Masters posted a news story in his Weather Underground blog on a possible new record for the highest temperature ever recorded on the continent of Antarctica. On Tuesday, a record high…
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With the onset of spring, farmers are busy getting out into the fields and starting their planting. Variable weather across the nation has led to a variety of weather- and climate-related impacts on agriculture. Here are some links to stories on some of these impacts. AgWeb reported that soggy soils from heavy rains in the…
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Cliff Mass of the University of Washington posted a long article on his blog this week describing the atmospheric and oceanic conditions which have led to the unusual conditions for the past two years. While his blog is focused on the Pacific Northwest, much of his analysis also applies to the Southeast, with the caveat…
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EDENotes, the blog of the Extension Disaster Education Network, posted their spring outlook this week at https://blogs.extension.org/edenotes/2015/03/25/weather-wednesday-spring-outlook/. As I noted earlier, the forecast calls for an increased chance of above normal precipitation in April through June in the Southeast. ProFarmer also published an article describing the expansion of drought in the Northern and Central Great…
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The State Climate office of North Carolina has released their latest blog posting this week on last winter’s conditions in NC. In the blog posting they also provide an analysis of how the forecasts from folklore and from their own analysis panned out. They close with an update on El Nino and its likely impacts…
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The Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory released a short article this week describing research to be published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. In the article it discusses the variability in temperature distributions in different El Nino episodes. Some episodes feature strong temperature anomalies, while others are weaker. Some favor the strongest warming near…