One of the classes I have to take for my graduate program is a lecture series where people come in from other universities/places to talk about their research. They are usually fairly interesting. The best one so far was probably this past friday. Mostly because he was funny and included in his slide show a picture of a road sign warning people of things that could fall off a cliff onto their car, rocks and a cow. :) His name was Elwynn Taylor and he is an agricultural meteorologist from Iowa State University. Besides his humorous stuff he talked about the changing climate, climate cycles, and soybean rust movement. So here's my little prediction from what I learned: Looking at the precipitation cycle over the past few hundreds of years, we are entering a six year period where according to history we should see two serious corn belt droughts. So there's a 1 in 3 chance of seeing a drought over the next 6 years. And if your worried about soybean rust reaching us in Illinois. Watch for it appearing in Texas. A low level jet can up from Texas to the midwest, so if it's in Texas the disease will travel with the jet and end up wherever the jet terminates. I am just impressed that I took something away from his talk.
Elwynn Taylor's Weather and Crop Comments
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