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The latest Drought Monitor, released yesterday, shows that the area of moderate D1 drought in Florida has shrunk again this week under the continuing influence of rainy conditions. The area of abnormally dry conditions has also decreased by 60 percent. No drought is present in any other states in the Southeast.
Posted in: Drought -
AgWeb posted an interesting story this week about the increase in the use of drought-tolerant hybrids of corn in recent years. The first seeds with drought tolerance were made available in 2011 and the percent of corn acreage planted with the new hybrids has grown to over 20% since then. I expect to see this…
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The National Centers for Environmental Information are continuing to catch up from the government shutdown and provided their annual climate summary for 2018 for the United States this week. It shows that as a whole, the Southeast was much warmer than normal and was also much wetter than normal, with North Carolina and Virginia experiencing…
Posted in: Climate summaries -
NOAA’s Climate.gov provides a lot of interesting statistics on the climate. Thankfully, they are back after the shutdown! And even though this is an article from 2014, it still contains valuable information, including a map which shows the average coldest day of the year. While it’s a little hard to decipher the various shades of…
Posted in: Climate science -
The South Carolina State Climate Office released a new online map-journal today describing the impacts of Hurricane Florence on South Carolina after the storm made landfall in North Carolina. Very cool! You can check it out at https://scdnr.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=c2d63441bc974cadb52f0bed7528aae1.
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NOAA and NASA released their joint climate summary for 2018 for the globe today. The report shows that 2018 was the 4th warmest year on record for the earth as a whole, and the last five years were the 5 hottest on record. The US experienced 14 disasters with damages that were $1 billion or…
Posted in: Climate summaries -
You all remember the scenes of devastated forests after recent storms like Hurricane Michael, which caused billions of dollars of damage to forests in the Southeast this fall. Other big hurricanes in past years have also caused significant damage to forests. But how do the forests repair themselves after a big storm? The Scientist has…