Tools for climate and agriculture
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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…
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Scientists at the University of Florida have created a new model that may help growers plant at optimal times and avoid drought. The model, called ARID (Agricultural Reference Index for Drought), predicts water loss for crops like cotton, peanuts, soybeans and corn, using weather variables like temperature, humidity, wind and solar energy and translates that…
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A new blog on El Nino-Southern Oscillation (better known as ENSO) is now available from NOAA at https://www.climate.gov/news-features/department/8443/all. This blog will provide background information and current discussion about the status of El Nino and La Nina as well as descriptions of its impact across the United States and the world. ENSO has big impacts on…
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So far May has been feast or famine for rainfall in the Southeast. I saw standing water on the fields in northern Florida into southern Georgia as I drove back from Tallahassee to Athens last week, but dust clouds as I got close to home. This map shows the rankings of the month-to-date…