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NOAA’s Central Pacific Hurricane Center has upgraded Tropical Storm Pali to a hurricane. It is the earliest recorded hurricane in a calendar year in the Central Pacific. The previous record was held by Hurricane Ekeka in January 1992. Hurricane Pali is centered about 650 miles (1045 km) south-southwest of Johnston Island and 1320 miles (2125…
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Reporters often ask me about how a month or a season ranked compared to other years of record. I like to use the Southeastern Regional Climate Center’s Perspectives tool to help determine that. You can use the link https://www.sercc.com/perspectives?user=true and set your own start and end point to pick the time period of interest. For most…
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The videotaped presentations from the conference on Navigating Agriculture through the Water-Energy-Food Nexus held in Austin TX in November are now available here. This one day conference addressed the following important questions: What are the linkages between water, energy, and food systems? What are the interdependencies and tradeoffs that will influence future policy and sustainability of agriculture?…
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NASA published a blog post on a set of soil composition maps this week, which really show the range of water-holding capacity across the United States. The series of maps show the composition of soil by sand, clay, and silt as well as showing the available water storage. As expected, the water storage of Southeastern soils…
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The National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) has a page which allows you to graph accumulated precipitation for selected stations across the country and compare this year to previous years. These graphs are called Haywood plots and you can view the current graphs at https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/monitoring-references/dyk/elnino-2015-2016 under “Haywood Plots”. Previous strong El Niños are highlighted in blue with…
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ABC News posted a story today about the severe drought in South Africa. In the last week 11 people have died from heatstroke associated with record-setting high temperatures in the dry conditions. One farmer reported that he has already lost $60,000 this season because he has not been able to plant a single seed. He…
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The latest 7-day QPF map shows that the heaviest rain for the next week is expected off the coast in the Gulf of Mexico with an extension into southern Florida. Other areas of the Southeast will receive more moderate amounts of around an inch near the coasts and a half to one inch farther inland.…
Posted in: Climate outlooks