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The latest 7-day QPF map shows that most of the Southeast should see relatively little rain in the next week. The exception is a swath stretching from SW Alabama to the northeast all the way to western NC and VA, which should see more rain, especially late in the week. Warmer and wetter than normal…
Posted in: Climate outlooks -
A journal article released today in Science Advances shows that when springlike temperatures occur earlier in the year, plants green up earlier and draw more moisture out of the soil, changing the water balance by increasing evapotranspiration and drying out the soil earlier in the growing season. It could also amplify summer droughts by reducing…
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The Southeast Farm Press posted a reminder this week that the annual Georgia Ag Forecast series will be held at five different locations around Georgia near the end of January. This event provides information about last year’s harvests of Georgia crops and an outlook for prices and other information for the coming year. You can…
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This week I ran across a story about Antarctic ice sheets and how a collapse of one of the sheets in the Western Antarctic could result in rapidly rising sea levels. While this story is about a year old, it was new to me and provided more context about how the ice sheets are melting…
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When I was a kid, my dad would sometimes take me ice fishing on the local lake in winter. A lot of folks in Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota go ice fishing every year. When I was the Wisconsin State Climatologist, one of my jobs was to call the official closing and opening of the lakes…
Posted in: Climate and Ag in the news -
The latest monthly climate outlook for January 2020 is now available from the Climate Prediction Center. It shows that all of the Southeast is expected to be warmer than normal, particularly in the southern parts of the region. Most of the region is also leaning towards wetter than normal conditions, due in part to the…
Posted in: Climate outlooks -
The latest Drought Monitor, released this morning, shows that the drought status across most of the Southeast, including Puerto Rico, has not changed from last week. The only exception is in coastal Virginia, where an area of abnormally dry conditions has crept into the region. With the rain that they are expected to get in…
Posted in: Drought