Storm Trooper Weather Forecasting

Yesterday morning we went out to check cattle before the heat became unbearable.  It was actually quite pleasant and a few unexpected clouds were popping up to produce brief showers.  The one in the photograph was blossoming to the west and reminded me of a Storm trooper from Star Wars.  As I look at it though, it might have been a white gorilla -- hmmm...I suppose in some minds that would be the same thing.

I have always been fascinated with clouds and weather.  Where I grew up on the southern edge of the Texas Panhandle, watching the weather was sometimes a matter of survival.  Thunderstorms there often produce large hail, high winds and tornadoes.  The advantage there over many other places is that you can see the clouds coming for miles -- some might say, for days.

Weather is critical to agriculture.  I frequently find myself looking at weather app's on my cell phone to see what the local temperature might be, or whether a shower is expected.  Radar images are just a click away.  Some app's show rainfall totals, soil reflectivity and many other things useful to agriculture.  Weather satellites circle the earth and provide a tremendous amount of data that makes forecasting much more accurate each and every year.  The availability of those forecasts and other information gleaned by those "eyes-in-the-sky" is becoming increasingly important in precision farming.

Beyond things like rainfall, heat stress and weather risk, some app's even provide tools to help evaluate the likelihood of disease based on weather conditions and patterns.  If the outbreak of a disease is unlikely, spraying is probably not necessary or, conversely, if the risk is high, timely application of fungicides can prevent heavy losses or damage to a crop.

In my part of the world it would be helpful if we had something to predict an outbreak of army worms!  Last year they came just as the grass was recovering from a drought-stressed summer.  The new growth was quickly reduced to leafless stems.  Hope turned to dust overnight and hay became an extremely precious commodity.

After thinking about it, maybe that wasn't a Storm Trooper in the cloud yesterday morning.  Perhaps it was the weather guy taking a look to see what could be expected.  I was just thankful for the brief coolness before the heat began to bake us.  On a similar front (pun intended), we suddenly went from no rain in the 2-week forecast to a good chance, starting on Sunday, for a few days.  It will probably change again between now and then.  That's one of the frustrations of all of this new weather information being so readily available -- there are lots of different models designed to predict what will happen and as conditions change, the forecast changes -- sometimes multiple times a day.  In spite of all of these new tools, the "storm trooper" in the sky doesn't always get it right.  Storm Trooper just seems to be such an appropriate name for the weather guy....