(FARGO, ND) — With how dry and warm it has been in many parts of the Plains and Corn Belt the last month, this week’s early week frost and freeze event is not that big of a concern for late season crops. The continued dryness, however, is a concern according to Eric Snodgrass, Principal Atmospheric Scientist for Nutrien Ag Solutions.
Early week frost and freeze warnings stretch from the Plains into the eastern Corn Belt but Snodgrass says that things are mostly on-time and not a huge concern at this point. “We’re going to watch that colder air slide into the Corn Belt, Central and Eastern Corn Belt, Tuesday and Wednesday,” according to Snodgrass. “Wednesday might be the coolest for the Eastern Corn Belt. A lot of folks, it doesn’t matter. I mean, this is about on time. Where I live in Champaign (Illinois), October 17th is our average first frost date. So we’re right about on it. And given how hot it was for most of September, anybody that needed that extra heat got it. And so the crop got to where it should have been. Therefore we’re not hearing a whole lot of, you know, negative talk around the risk of these frost events.”
The bigger concern for Snodgrass moving forward is just how dry it has become over many areas of the Plains and Corn Belt. He points to a potential storm system later this week moving out of the Rockies into the western Corn Belt but he’s not too confident in that. And that’s because there isn’t much moisture in the atmosphere to sustain rainfall.
“The real reason is for the last 45 to 50 days, it has been so dry in the midsection of the country that you have to…..it takes multiple events to kind of revive the water in the system,” says Snodgrass. “Not just the ground and the air, but the whole thing together to get storms to kind of live in that area. And I’ve got places in the plains right now where soil moisture is in the lowest we’ve ever observed. I’ve got places, Plains and Midwest, we’ve got numerous climate reporting districts that are showing a 132 out of 132, meaning it’s the driest last 45 days going back to 1893. So, this is important to see this pattern evolve, but it’s got to evolve in a much bigger way to bring moisture up so that we can get some better fall field work.”
Snodgrass also says he is hoping for better precipitation in November before winter settles in. That, in part, because it is tough to bust a drought in winter.
“I’m putting a lot of weight on the chances for rain for November. And it’s for the reason that you just talked about. We’ve got to recover some soil moisture before we get into winter. It’s hard to recover it in winter. When it gets cold, the atmosphere just can’t contain as much water as it can when it’s warm. That’s a principle of the atmosphere. So we often don’t look for winter to be a drought recovery time period. We then start to put a lot of pressure on spring rains, and this is just kind of ticking off boxes of concern going forward into next growing season, simply because we will have a La Nina this winter, how much of an influence, I don’t know, but usually years following La Nina don’t tend to be the best in terms of gaining a lot of moisture in the central United States.”
You can hear the full conversation with Eric Snodgrass on this week’s Market Talk Weekly Weather Update; watch the video on YouTube below: