A Corn Belt Weather Forecast

Haylie Shipp

This is the Ag Information Network.

Going through journalism school, we learned that the two topics that garner the most interest from your listeners: anything that impacts their health and anything that impacts their pocketbook. When it comes to the pocketbook of American agriculture, there’s not much that has more of an impact than the weather, so what is this spring going to look like? Brad Rippey is an agricultural meteorologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. This is his outlook…

“As we head into the spring of 2024, we continue to see the influence of El Nino on weather patterns even though El Nino has started to wane a little bit. We hit peak strength back in the mid-winter and so we’re still dealing with kind of unwinding the impacts of El Nino this spring. Interestingly, it looks like we’re going to do an almost complete flip-flop during the late spring and summer back into La Nina. So that means that the waters that have been warm in the equatorial Pacific should cool down. Not expecting a big impact from that quick flip in the summer of 2024. I think we’ll see a lot of the impacts of El Nino lasting which hopefully means better moisture in the Cotton Belt and hopefully will keep temperatures down a little bit with that rainier weather.”

So that’s a little bit more nearterm, but how about the long game? We’ll have that with Brad Rippey tomorrow.