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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…
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As a former National Weather Service employee with many friends currently working in the NWS, I have been following the evolving government shutdown carefully. Many NWS employees are considered essential, so they will be working through the shutdown, but a number of services will be stopped until the shutdown ends. Hopefully, these folk will get…
Posted in: Climate and Ag in the news -
Southeast Farm Press posted a story this week about how a dry spell in fall benefited burley tobacco growers in Tennessee and Kentucky. The dry spell in September helped the tobacco dry down in the field, but by October, moister air helped them achieve the desired color. The absence of an early frost also helped…