Missing Strategies to Overcome Extreme Weather
Ninety percent of crop losses in the United States are related to extreme weather, with drought and excess moisture as the top causes. Flash floods and droughts are increasing in severity, causing soil erosion or contamination and threatening crop yields.
However, farmers have limited information on how to manage crop, soil and water in response to changing climate conditions.
The failure to develop strategies in the face of flash floods and droughts is due, in part, to three considerable research gaps:
- Most studies focus on long-term effects of extreme events, leaving information about short-term events out of decision support tools.
- A lack of high-resolution satellite data on irrigation makes it difficult to assess irrigation’s impacts on water resources and crop productivity.
- Previous studies often looked at the effects of extreme weather events on overall ecosystems, but detailed, comparative analyses of individual crops’ recovery from these events are missing.
To overcome these gaps, researchers at University of Tennessee, Knoxville and the UT Institute of Agriculture, led by Dr. John Schwartz, director of the Tennessee Water Resources Research Center and UT professor, are leveraging a variety of data sources and analytical techniques to develop and test a weather-based tool to bolster field operations across the Tennessee River Basin and surrounding Southeast U.S. regions in the face of both long- and short-term weather hazards.