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The peanut crop in Florida last year suffered a significant decline, and scientists are scratching their heads trying to figure out what caused it. One of the early possibilities discussed was salty water dropped by Hurricane Irma, but the actual causes are most likely a combination of several factors. Bob Kemerait of UGA describes the…
Posted in: Climate and Ag in the news -
The Packer noted in a story this week that strong winds in California last fall have affected the crop of lemons harvested by increasing scarring of the skin, which reduced the value of the crop, although the juice quality was otherwise unaffected. Some lemons were also destroyed by the Western wildfires, which were also driven…
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I am working on a talk that I will be giving at the UGA Extension Winter School on Wednesday about freeze protection for fruit; my co-presenters are Drs. Erick Smith and Tim Coolong. In my part of the talk I describe the difference between advective and radiative freezes. Advective freezes occur when cold and (often)…
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If you love to look at maps, you will be interested in this new GIS-based map of forest cover in the US. This is the latest in a string of GIS-based maps of river basins for various continents, and the author Robert Szucs has been featured for these on this blog and other places in the…
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When I was a kid in Michigan, my grandmother’s yard was filled with sassafras trees. So I was very interested in this article from the USDA about ambrosia beetles, which can kill a sassafras tree in just four weeks. Will milder winters cause the trees I remember from Michigan succumb to ambrosia beetles in the…
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The latest climate outlook for February and for February through April was released by NOAA earlier this week. It shows that the most likely conditions are for warmer and drier conditions to cover much of the Southeast, especially in Florida and the southern parts of Alabama and Georgia. Areas to the north of that could…
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Time magazine posted an interesting photo essay recently describing changes in ice taking place around Antarctica. Climatologists know that the high latitudes (both in the Arctic and Antarctic) are the most likely places to see the impacts of changing climate because of the albedo effect, which affects how much sunlight is absorbed by the ground…