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The latest ENSO outlook was released today. It shows that La Nina is still hanging on now, but that neutral conditions are expected to return later this spring and last through summer. The current forecast for next fall and winter is for La Nina to return in a “double dip”, which happens fairly frequently with…
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The latest Drought Monitor, released this morning, shows that while drought did not expand in Alabama, abnormally dry conditions expanded in Alabama, Florida, and Georgia with little rain and warm temperatures making for pleasant but dry weather. Now that plants are coming out of dormancy and temperatures are going up, we can expect to see…
Posted in: Drought -
In addition to this blog, I am now also contributing to The Garden Professors once a month. Here is a past article by John Porter of Nebraska from their blog which describes why starting seeds at their optimal temperature is so important. While the article discusses this in terms of the home gardener who is…
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Here is a thoughtful article about changes that foresters are seeing in some of the forests around the world that have been decimated by wildfires. In a number of places, after a fire comes through, there is no regrowth of trees even after a number of years. This has been attributed to changes in the…
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There have been a lot of stories about climate in the news this week. Here are a sprinkling of the most interesting ones. Science: Butterflies are vanishing in the western U.S.—but not for the reasons scientists thought CBS News: Humans, not nature, may be changing Atlantic hurricane cycles Yale Climate Connections: U.S. dams, levees get…
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It’s March, and that means that it is time for the annual competition to sign up new observers for CoCoRaHS, the citizen science network for precipitation measurements. Every year we have a friendly competition between states to see who can sign up the most new observers. Today, the North Carolina Climate Office posted a great…
Posted in: Climate and Ag in the news -
The latest monthly and seasonal climate summaries for the US were released by NOAA today. They show that due to the cold outbreak which stretched through the central part of the country, it was the coldest February in 30 years. The last time February was this cold was 1989. In spite of that, this winter…
Posted in: Climate summaries