Climate science
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While temperature and related growing degree days help control how fast corn and other crops develop, it’s less well known that solar radiation also has an effect. If it’s warm but cloudy, the corn growth will be slower than if skies are sunny. This is one reason that we are planning to put a solar…
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It’s getting to be that time of year again. We are approaching the average date of first frost for the Athens and Atlanta areas. Parts of northern GA have already experienced a bit of frost earlier this fall, and colder weather may bring freezing air into more of the state within the next week or…
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Occasionally I get asked if and how climate change is affecting extreme weather in the Southeast. This has come up more frequently in the past few years with all of the hurricanes which have impacted agriculture in the past few years, including Matthew, Florence, Irma, and Michael. Here is a lengthy but useful description of…
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Every farmer and extension agent that I talk to agrees that recent changes to USDA have caused a lot of concern about the agency’s ability to serve the agricultural community. Questions have arisen about the loss of expertise in the move of some parts of the agency out of Washington and the removal of certain…
Posted in: Climate science -
When we look at sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, we are commonly looking for signs of El Niño or La Niña, which can greatly affect the climate of the Southeast, especially in winter. But recently the most interesting part of the Pacific has not been near the equator where we usually see ENSO…
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As I was looking at my Facebook feed, it reminded me of a photo I took out my office window in 2014 showing the trees outside in their fall colors. This year, the color is barely showing yet. A lot of that can be attributed to the extremely warm September we had. Here are a…
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Yale Environment 360 has a really interesting article which describes some of the ways that climate zones are shifting on earth. This has profound implications for agriculture as well as ecosystems because the climate zones (defined by a combination of temperature and precipitation characteristics) determine the kinds of crops you can grow and when you…