Severe

  • At the recent annual meeting of the National Weather Association in August, Steve Nelson of the National Weather Service produced a poster that described some of the extreme wind events that have been measured by the University of Georgia’s mesonet of weather stations. You might be interested in viewing the 5-minute video–you can see it…

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  • Here is an excellent piece describing trends in tornadoes in the United States over time from Yale Climate Connections. The online title asks if climate change is affecting tornado climatology, and the short answer is “not as far as we can tell now”. There are some trends towards seeing more tornadoes, especially weak ones, that…

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  • This week is the National Weather Service’s Lightning Awareness week. All this week they will be posting information about lightning causes, climatology, and safety. In Georgia, sadly, we have already had at least one death from lightning this year when a lightning bolt hit the ocean near a swimmer near Tybee Island and the electrical…

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  • Reports of damage from the storms of Saturday, April 24, are continuing to come in. In addition to the very heavy rain across the area, numerous reports of damaging hail and strong winds were reported in southern AL and GA and in northern FL, leading to crop damage and outright losses there. I have received…

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  • With the heavy rain this past weekend in southern Georgia along with large hail in some southwestern counties, Georgia farmers are reeling. I have seen a number of pictures showing fields washed out by the rain, causing damage that could take thousands of dollars to repair. I have also heard some reports of hail damage…

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  • I spend most of my time talking about climate and agriculture, but I want to take just a minute to toot my horn for the Atmospheric Sciences program at the University of Georgia. They are a rapidly growing program in the Department of Geography at UGA and have grown to almost 60 majors in just…

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  • In just a few minutes, a hail storm can reduce a beautiful crop to shredded greenery, destroying whatever yield it might have had or seriously reducing it. But some hail damage only slows the crop down and much of the initial loss can be recouped by later growth. Farm Progress this week described some research…

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