Subject: Why is it so dry ?

From: Roy Howland <[email-masked]>
Date: 12 May 1996 16:35:56 GMT

I am an arable farmer and live in Essex, England,  Our weather 
has now been dry for many weeks and it was the same last year.  
If anybody studies the weather I would be interested to know if 
they could explain why this has occured and forecast when it 
might rain again.  I would be grateful for your help, my e-mail 
address is:

Roy Howland 101577,1633 @ compuserve.com

Thank you for your help

Roy Howland

-- 
Roy Howland
101577,1633 @ compuserve.com

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From: Oz <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 May 1996 18:57:09 +0100

In article <[email-masked]>, Roy Howland
<[email-masked]> writes
>might rain again.  I would be grateful for your help, my e-mail 

Remember 1976, and know fear.

Nobody can tell you why. Even the weather forcasters can't manage a day
or two ahead. But I haven't liked that big high over
Greenland/N.Atlantic being there most of the winter. If it slips south
and grows we are in for real serious trouble indeed.

Wheat at UKP200+/ton is not impossible if we suddenly average only
30cwt/ac.

------------------------------- 
'Oz     "When I knew little, all was certain. The more I learnt,
        the less sure I was. Is this the uncertainty principle?"

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From: Randy Mann <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 May 1996 13:05:50 -0700

Roy Howland wrote:
> 101577,1633 @ compuserve.comThis pattern is caused by the blocking of the huge high pressure 
ridge over Greenland. It's causing a "split flow" in the upper jet stream 
patterns over the European continent including the British Isles. This 
similar to the type of blocking pattern in the U.S. that has resulted in 
parching drought over the Hard Red Winter Wheat areas of the central and 
southern Great Plains. The 1996 U.S. winter wheat crop of a puny 1.36 
billion bushels is the smallest since 1978. This is important because 
there was a major drought in the mid-1970's in the British Isles that 
tied in directly with a similar dry pattern in the U.S. We have seen in 
the last few days some welcome moisture push into the southern Plains of 
the U.S. as well as across the drier areas of Europe. Continued 
improvement is likely across the European continent and later the same 
pattern should bring renewed rains to the British Isles and, possibly, 
above normal amounts of precipitation from the mid-June through early 
August period. The drought pattern currently over the British Isles and 
parts of Europe should move eastward into the C.I.S. countries and Russia 
both east and west of the Ural Mountains by the early to mid summer 
period. Hope this helps out.

Randy Mann
Harris-Mann, Inc.
[email-masked]

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From: [email-masked] (COUGER GORDON)
Date: 13 May 1996 13:56:11 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
>and grows we are in for real serious trouble indeed.
When I was farming I did some computer models trying to estimate the risk
in farming. In Southwestern Oklahama rainfall is by far the most important
factor. The best method I could come up with for modeling weather was to
input the rainfall for each month over the last 20 or 30 years and randomly
pick a rainfall amount for each month.

While this did not take into account trends or changes in climate it worked
pretty well in producing yeilds that averaged about what the actual crops
did over the same years.

Any climate changes will ruin this model as well as any other model. My
model is useless for predicting next year but reasonably good at predicting
the next ten years.

What I was doing was repeatedly running the model for 20 years and looking
at how you came out in the end. After thousands of runs the model gave me
a 20% chance of going broke and an 80% chance of getting rich. It seldom
came out just getting by. Is seems that if you ever got the debt paid off
you got rich. If you never got the debt paid off you went broke.

I went broke. If I had trusted my model more it gave enough warning that I
could have sold out at a small profit insted of walking away from a quarter
million loss.

Gordon

Gordon Couger Senior Software Specialist
Biosystems & Agricultural Engineering Dept.  Oklahoma State Univ.
114 Ag Hall Stillwater, OK 74075
[email-masked]

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From: [email-masked] (Usuario 1 de Educaci�n)
Date: Fri, 17 May 1996 01:01:52 GMT

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