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On February 9, 1870, Congress and President Ulysses S. Grant passed a law to establish the first national weather service in the United States. You can read more about the history of weather observations in the US at https://www.weather.gov/timeline. They are hard at work 24/7/365 to keep us safe as well as to provide information that…
Posted in: Events -
NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center announced today that La Niña is now officially over. This is just as expected based on the predictions of a weak event from late last year. The sea surface temperature map below shows that while the central Pacific is still colder than normal, the eastern Pacific is now above normal in…
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The latest Drought Monitor released this morning shows no change in the drought status from last week. Last week’s map also showed no change from the week before. What will happen next week? Rain in the last day (after the cut-off for today’s map) may help reduce the drought more, but we will have to…
Posted in: Drought -
NOAA released their monthly climate summary for the United States for January 2017. It shows that overall the US was wetter and warmer than average, although of course there was variation across the country. For Georgia, for example, it was ranked 117 out of 123 years for temperature (7th warmest) and 118 out of 123…
Posted in: Climate summaries -
I gave a talk on projections of future climate today to a group of farmers and other interested folk in LaGrange, GA. One of the things we discussed in the talk is how weather and climate forecasts are similar and how they are different, because they are really designed to do different things even though…
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According to the USA-NPN’s Spring Indices, spring is arriving 20 days earlier than a long-term average (1981-2010) in much of the Southeastern US. The Extended Spring Indices are models that predict the onset of early spring plants across the United States. You can see these maps as well as maps of Accumulated Growing Degree Days…
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Earlier this month NASA published a study showing that 1/3 of big groundwater basins across the earth were in distress. One of them was what they list as the Atlantic and Gulf Coastal Plains aquifer, which provides irrigation and drinking water to a large area of south Georgia, Alabama, Florida and other states around the Gulf…