• Drovers Newsletter posted a story today describing some of the continuing impacts of the Southeastern drought on cattle production.  Fortunately, recent rains and cooler temperatures over the winter have improved the drought conditions significantly, but with warmer and drier conditions now occurring again, this could mean more problems for farmers down the road.  You can…

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  • The Macon Telegraph ran a story earlier this week on the impacts of the unusually warm winter on chill hours for peaches.  As I mentioned in a post a few days ago, the number of chill hours accumulated over this winter is only about half of the normal number of chill hours.  Peaches need a…

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  • By the time you read this on Monday morning, the Oroville Dam in California, holding back the second biggest reservoir in the state, may have been washed out.  As of Sunday night, there are flash flood warnings due to an imminent collapse of the auxiliary spillway for low-lying areas downstream of the dam.  While the…

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  • NOAA has a great discussion of a frigid outbreak of cold air that occurred in 1899, culminating in bitterly cold conditions on February 10.  Here is how their discussion starts: “Over 115 years ago, a cold wave that would become known as the “Great Arctic Outbreak” took the United States by storm. People across the…

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  • Climatologists know that the most likely place to first see the impacts of a warmer world is in the Arctic, where feedbacks due to snow and sea ice and their effect on the albedo make climate very sensitive to small temperature variations.  Albedo is the reflectivity of the earth’s surface, and snow and ice are…

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  • This Day in History posted a story this week on an article published in the Sacramento Bee back on February 11, 1921, describing a terrible tornado which hit the Gardner Settlement near Toomsboro, east of Macon, Georgia on February 10.  The tornado track was described as five miles long and half a mile wide and…

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  • On the EarthSky blog today the authors posted a short video of a spacecraft destroying a sundog.   You’ve probably seen sundogs or parhelia before–they are optical phenenoma caused by sunlight refracting through ice crystals which show up as spots of light to the left or right of the sun, usually near sunrise or sunset.…

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