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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…
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Have you ever wondered what is the average hottest day of the year? Turns out it depends on where in the Southeast you live. This map from the National Climatic Data Center shows that people in Georgia experience their hottest day in mid-July while folks in southern Florida and in northwest Alabama experience it several…
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EarthSky blog has a good description of why the hottest days of summer lag behind the maximum sunlight. It has to do with thermal inertia, the fact that it takes time for the sun to warm up land and water. For the same reason, the hottest temperature in an average sunny day is not at…
Posted in: Climate and Ag in the news -
The Office of the State Climatologist in North Carolina recently posted a blog entry on the four main factors for plant growth, which I linked to here a while back. Here is the second part of this blog, addressing the impacts of weather on NC agriculture. Many of these comments are relevant to other parts…
Posted in: Climate and Ag in the news -
Today is the first day of astronomical summer, as the sun reaches its highest point in the noon sky. Climatologists don’t use June 21 as the first day of climatological summer, though, since for most people the warmest temperatures align best with the June 1-August 31 period. But it is still a good chance to…
Posted in: Climate outlooks -
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…