Climate science
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If you are an agricultural producer or an extension agent, chances are you spend a lot of time outside, especially during the growing season. You know what it’s like to work through extreme heat and humidity, and hopefully you have included time in your schedule to cool off and hydrate. For people who work outside…
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Since the 1960s, temperatures across the Southeast and the entire world have been increasing, although there is a lot of year-to-year variability which is the bane of farmers everywhere. For the Southeast, a temperature increase of 1 degree F translates into a roughly one-week increase in the length of the growing season based on some…
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The “Urban Heat Island” effect is an artificial warming of the climate in the center of urban areas due to increased heating by pavement and lack of shade due to loss of tree cover, among other things. This 3-minute YouTube video describes some efforts by big cities like Los Angeles and New York to combat…
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There have been a number of stories in the news in recent weeks about the number of record high temperatures that are being set around the world. You might wonder if this is becoming more frequent than in previous decades. Here is a careful analysis by climatologist Brian Brettschneider looking at the number of record…
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When I lived in Wisconsin, we said in the summer when it was humid that all that water vapor was from the corn growing in Iowa. Earth.com posted a recent story which described an ongoing experiment to look at changes in clouds due to agricultural irrigation in the Great Plains. The field experiment is called…
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I give talks to a lot of different groups around the state, and find that some groups have very different opinions about climate and climate change than others do. It depends on many things, including how old you are, how and what you produce on your farm, and what your political views are. When you…
Posted in: Climate science -
NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center produces long-range forecasts for several time periods, including 6-10 days, 8-14 days, 3-4 weeks, and for one to three months at a time going out to as much as a year ahead. Most of these forecasts provide shading to indicate where the probabilities are tipped towards warmer or colder than normal…