Are you a farmer who wants to keep better track of the climate conditions around you?
There’s an app for that.
A group from the USDA Agricultural Research Station (ARS) has introduced a web-based application to help. It allows users to access important historical information about the past climate in their area. This could allow them to better plan for the current year.
“We wanted to make an application that addresses some of the most basic questions that producers tend to ask about the current year’s weather,” explains Steven Mauget of ARS. “How does this year's rainfall or growing degree days compare with recent years? Are soil conditions warm enough to plant? When does first freeze usually occur in my area?”
The data in the application comes from mesonet weather stations. A mesonet is a network of weather stations placed at a certain distance from each other — usually about 20 miles apart. These closely-spaced stations shed light on local weather features associated with thunderstorms and gust fronts.
The web application can be used by anyone interested in the data, such as farmers, certified crop advisers, and extension agents. It mainly covers the 10-county area surrounding the city of Lubbock, Texas. It also covers the Rolling Plains to the east of the city.
“These weather features occur over ‘mesoscale’ spatial scales,” Mauget says. “They are kind of midway between small scale features like dust devils and storm clouds and larger scale features like the low and high pressure systems that might extend across many states.”
In most regions, the spatial separation of stations in normal weather networks are too far apart to detect these weather events that are important to farmers and ranchers, he adds.
The web application presents data from the previous 10 years. Mauget says that traditionally, people study climate over longer periods, such as 30 years. More recently however, as climate is changing in some regions, it can be defined in periods as short as 10 years.
The new tool provides important information such as soil temperature, cumulative growing degree days, and cumulative precipitation. It also gives first freeze dates and cumulative freeze hours, among other data.
Source: dl.sciencesocieties.org