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Historical records of hurricanes only go back a few hundred years and are captured mainly in places where people lived in coastal areas. How do climatologists learn about hurricanes which occurred before humans were there to record their occurrence? It turns out that hurricanes leave recognizable patterns of mud and sand deposits in coastal areas…
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The Global Climate Dashboard is a NOAA tool which allows you to look at trends in climate over time for a variety of variables like sea level, carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere, and incoming sunlight. You can read more about it here. Or you can access it directly along with other maps and tools…
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Because of the dry conditions across a lot of the Southeast in September, many stations in the region reported their highest ever average maximum temperature for the month, according to maps from the Southeast Regional Climate Center’s Perspectives tool (https://sercc.com/perspectives). Minimum temperatures were also ranked in the top five at many places but almost none…
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I once did a project looking at trends in auto sales at big outdoor lots depending on the weather. Not surprisingly, rainy and snowy days cut sales at those lots, especially on weekends. Even if the weather was good the next week, the sales never quite came back. Here is a new study described in…
Posted in: Climate and Ag in the news -
As temperatures get warmer across the Southeast, blueberry growers are looking towards planting more varieties that have lower chill hour requirements. One great place to look is to Florida, where chill hours are naturally lower. Here is an interesting description of the UF Blueberry Breeding Program and how they are working to find new productive…
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The latest monthly climate outlook for October 2019 was released today. It shows that warmer than normal temperatures and drier than normal rainfall are likely to dominate the weather in October. Remember that this monthly outlook is based primarily on what is likely to happen the first two weeks of the month and is less…
Posted in: Climate outlooks -
One fifth of the world’s calories come from wheat in the form of bread, noodles, and cereal. But rising temperatures and more extremes of precipitation have made it more difficult to grow wheat consistently. This is even more important considering the growth of the population that is likely to depend on wheat for their nutritional…