Climate and Ag in the news
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As our region gets warmer, farmers are coming up with new ways to adapt to the rising temperatures and more variable rainfall. That includes the choice of what crops they grow as well as when they plant, whether they use cover crops, what kind of irrigation (if any) they use, and other management techniques. Here…
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A severe heatwave across India has scorched their wheat crop, reducing their yields and making them consider how to replace the needed grain with the war going on in Ukraine stranding most of their harvest from last year, unable to be shipped out of their ports on the Black Sea due to the ongoing attacks.…
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I don’t talk about space weather too often because it usually does not affect climate or agriculture, but this is too interesting not to share. A new Mars expedition, the Emirates Mars Mission, the first interplanetary exploration undertaken by an Arab nation, today released stunning images of Mars’ mysterious auroras, including some new never-before seen…
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Wildfires propagate by sending sparks downwind, igniting the dry material and spreading the fire. A new study published in Nature Geoscience looks at the propagation of droughts and shows that droughts move by creating rainfall deficits that cause areas of dry soil downwind. That eventually expands the drought as rainfall is suppressed by the lack…
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Impacts from the spring frosts are continuing to show up in peach crops across the Southeast. This story from Specialty Crop Industry discusses the variety of sizes in early peaches in Alabama as likely caused by the frost damaging flowers in the early-blooming varieties. Less impact is showing up in the later-blooming varieties so far,…
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I’ve gotten some emails lately asking about how to report dry conditions and drought so that the Drought Monitor authors recognize that things are getting crunchy here in parts of the Southeast. Here is a refresher on what sites you can use to do it: There are a lot of different tools for monitoring drought…
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Forecasts of where hurricanes will go and how strong they will get have improved over time, but errors associated with the prediction cones can cost coastal communities a lot of money if they evacuate unnecessarily if a storm turns away or if they don’t prepare for a storm that is closer or stronger than expected.…