Tools for climate and agriculture
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Here is a neat tool for looking at historical tornado tracks across the country. It is run by the Midwestern Climate Center using the official Storm Prediction Center database and mapped onto an interactive map. You can zoom into your county and filter by date and Fujita scale of tornado. It defaults to F3 and…
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The National Weather Service office in Peachtree City GA announced that today is National Heatstroke Prevention Day. Heat is one of the leading killers due to weather across the nation, resulting in hundreds of fatalities each year. Since farmers and extension agents spend a lot of time outdoors in sultry summer conditions, it is important…
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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…