Tools for climate and agriculture
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I am attending a virtual conference hosted by the Midwestern Regional Climate Center this week. One of the talks reminded me of the great resources they have on their web site. If you go to https://mrcc.illinois.edu/clim/ and look under Resources, you can find climate maps as well as GIS-based station statistics. They include national maps…
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At this time of year, fruit farmers are anxiously watching their chill hours to see if they have received enough cold weather to help their plants produce a good set of flower buds for spring bloom. In the past few years, some winters have been touch or go with having enough. Early this year, it…
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The Drought.gov web site has gotten a fresh new look! The new Drought.gov includes easily accessible and shareable information, up-to-date drought conditions and forecasts down to the county and city level, interactive maps and data that don’t exist anywhere else, and a new “By Sector” section showing drought’s impacts on different economic sectors. If you…
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Here is a new web site that you can use to show year-to-date temperature and precipitation for individual stations across the US. It includes accumulated degree days as well. You can view it here and click to pick your station of interest. Use the Layer list to pick what variables you want to see. The…
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The US Geological Survey has a new online dashboard for their data which is going to be the ongoing major source of all USGS data. It also includes additional data from a number of other sources like the National Weather Service and is supposed to be more mobile-friendly than their previous web site. Brian McCallum…
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At my Flash Drought conference this week, one of the tools mentioned that I had not seen in a while was a map of short-term dry conditions that covers the US and provides a detailed spatial look at the variability of those conditions. It is the QuickDRI map that is available at https://quickdri.unl.edu/. In addition…
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I’m attending a virtual conference on flash drought this week, and one of the things we have discussed so far is the difficulty in identifying where drought conditions are occurring, especially when they are just beginning to be felt. The current network of weather stations, even when supplemented with entries in the Drought Impact Reporter…