Tools for climate and agriculture
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Farmers are masters of managing risk. They have to deal with variable weather, swings in the market, labor issues and many other factors on a daily basis. A new report on fighting global warming released today explains that making choices to manage the risks of climate change is like insuring your property and crops from…
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The USDA has a nice website for daily forecasts for cattle heat stress at https://www.ars.usda.gov/plains-area/clay-center-ne/marc/docs/heat-stress/main/. If you click on your regional link you get a day by day forecast of heat stress for the next seven days. You can also find out more information on the AnimalAgClimateChange website here.
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If you are interested in reading about the weather and agriculture of the Great Plains, you might want to check out this new blog by Albert Sutherland. His first post is a story about a new climate tool which shows trends in temperature and precipitation over time, similar to the NCDC “Climate at a Glance”…
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The Midwestern Climate Center has made an easy-to-use portal to National Weather Service cooperative weather data archives on their website, called cli-MATE. Even though they are located in Champaign IL and cover the Midwestern states, the database contains information for locations across the US. The system is free to use but you need to create…
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Do things seem really dry where you are? How much should you water your lawn or irrigate your crops? There are a number of commercial products out there that can help you determine this, but one simple method that is available for free is the Lawn and Garden Moisture Index, a daily map put out…
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You’ve all heard the term “heat index” to describe the added stress due to high humidities on days that are already hot. But what does this term really mean? Our friends from the NC State Climate Office explain it here in this blog posting. Similar types of indices are used to estimate stress on cattle…
Posted in: Tools for climate and agriculture -
The Washington Post published an article this week which explained why people differ in their interpretations of climate data trends. Trends are highly biased by which time period you pick to calculate the trend, and this article explains why we can have both a short-term cooling or hiatus in warming trends at the same time…