• The latest outlook for August 2019 was released today by NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, and they show that for the next month the region leans towards warmer than normal conditions. Precipitation is listed as having equal chances of above, below or near normal, but if you look at the breakdown by weeks at https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov, most…

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  • The latest Drought Monitor, released this morning, shows that most states in the region experienced slight increases in moderate drought over the last week due to low rainfall amounts. The only exception was Florida, which saw a slight decrease. Most areas of the Southeast should experience an inch or more of rain this week so…

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  • A story in Morning Ag Clips earlier this week discussed the increasing combination of solar power generation and agriculture by some US farmers. The practice of co-locating the two by planting crops under the shade of solar panels is called agrivoltaics. Underneath the solar panels, cooler and moisture conditions can reduce stress on crops and…

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  • Yale Climate Connections has an interesting story about the importance of the Great Smoky Mountains cloud cover on maintaining the local climate through balancing incoming and outgoing energy. Cloud forests at the tops of the ridges are maintained by dense clouds of microscopic water droplets and other areas benefit from the cloudy and moist conditions…

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  • Here is an interesting column published this week in AgWeb which discusses how this year’s crazy weather will impact farmers and their management choices in future years. Farmers will no longer be able to just do “business as usual” as far as planning for planting goes, and will need to consider using cover crops and…

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  • The latest forecasts for northern Georgia and surrounding areas show that scattered showers similar to what we are seeing today are expected to continue across the region for most of the next two weeks. These summer storms are very typical for late summer and because they are so scattered, getting rain from them (or conversely,…

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  • The Cloud Appreciation Society (https://cloudappreciationsociety.org/)is one of my favorite sites for viewing spectacular images of clouds. Here is a great story from Reuters about the society and how our views of clouds are changing our views of how the climate is changing. Clouds are one of the most important and not well understood influences on…

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