• With almost three weeks of rain under our belts, and everything dripping with moisture, the next thing to expect from all the standing water are clouds of mosquitoes. Besides being a nuisance, they can also carry diseases like West Nile Virus or Zika. Because of this, it is important to minimize pools of water where…

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  • The rainy, humid and cloudy weather has had some detrimental effects on wine and table grapes in the Southeast. UGA grape specialist Cain Hickey describes some of the issues they are having in a blog post from earlier this week. You can read it at https://site.extension.uga.edu/viticulture/2018/05/what-a-long-strange-bloom-its-been/. His blog is a great source of grape-specific information for…

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  • After two weeks of very rainy conditions, most producers in the Southeast will be pleased to note that this week’s rain forecast is for much smaller amounts over the course of the week, including dry days for most of the area on Monday and Tuesday. That will allow some of them to catch up on…

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  • If you follow this blog regularly, you know from previous posts that the meteorological seasons start at the beginning of months and not in mid-month as the astronomical calendar does. So June 1 marks the beginning of summer for meteorologists and climatologists. The choice of using the beginning of a calendar month is both practical…

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  • The official start of the Atlantic hurricane season is today, June 1. Obviously, we jumped the gun this year with Alberto transitioning from subtropical to tropical storm over land, but it is not that unusual to have a tropical system in the Atlantic before June 1. It is very unusual, though, to have one go…

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  • The preliminary maps for May 2018 show that temperature was well above normal for most of the region except for the Florida peninsula. Precipitation was above normal for most of the Southeast except for far western regions of the area. A lot of that surplus rain fell in the last two weeks with a plume…

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  • With all the rain we have had the last two weeks, farmers are surely suffering from the wet conditions. UGA’s Bob Kemerait published an article this week which describes some of the problems producers are seeing and some ways to manage for these soggy conditions. Problems range from an inability to get into the fields…

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