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A tropical low pressure area is continuing to drift south to SSW off the coast of Georgia and Florida. The National Hurricane Center gives this region a 60 percent chance of developing into a tropical depression in the next 48 hours and an 80 percent chance in the next five days. There are many factors…
Posted in: Climate outlooks -
A recent study of perceptions of climate change was undertaken in Kansas to learn what agricultural producers thought about climate change. The results are published here in the Journal of Extension. Based on focus group discussions at several locations in Kansas, most producers are worried about the potential impacts of climate change and are working to…
Posted in: Climate and Ag in the news -
For the first time this year there is a sign of potential development of a tropical storm off the east coast of the US. A broad region of low pressure has the potential to form a tropical system over the next few days. Currently this region is drifting to the south but if it develops…
Posted in: Climate outlooks -
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 National Climatic Data Center, located in Asheville NC, provides a wealth of weather and climate data as well as summaries of climate at a variety of time and space scales. The “State of the Climate” page provides links to a number of monthly climate summaries which describe conditions in other areas of the world,…
Posted in: Sources of weather and climate data -
A new bipartisan report entitled “Risky Business: The Economic Risks of Climate Change in the United States” was just released and is getting a lot of attention in the media. This report describes some of the economic impacts of increased warming, rising sea levels, and increasing variability on agricultural producers, coastal communities, and others in…
Posted in: Climate and Ag in the news -
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…