There will be floods.
California State Climatologist — yes, we have one — Dr. Michael A. Anderson forecasts critical changes ahead that will immediately cascade down to agricultural water managers and ag tech developers' ability to craft new software and connections to new hardware.
Of course, ag tech developers are fully cognizant that climate change is a market-maker. So when Dr. Anderson reports new findings, we’re all ears, huh?
Academic researchers, students and legislative policy staffers jammed his lunchtime presentation last week as part of the continuing UC Capitol Center series. It was the biggest crowd I’ve seen there in the last three or four years … they actually opened an overflow room.
Weather volatility is now firmly affixed to California, Anderson began. The 2016 El Niño largely fizzled, dropping 58 inches of precipitation on the north state, he said, when 50 inches is normal (whatever that was). So good, but not great.
And 25 percent of our precipitation fell in three weeks during March!
That’s not new — California’s reservoirs are traditionally filled by about five big storms each year — but the form of precipitation is evolving from less snow to more rain, Anderson noted.
Water will have to be managed more as rain and less as snowmelt, he said. This includes capturing, storing and using flood waters; there will be many more floods. “Drinking from the firehose” is no longer a metaphor, but an ag tech developers’ guideline.
“Stronger pulses of river water,” is the way our climatologist parsed it, which might be downplaying the results.
Software that manages the on-farm hardware will have to be closely and finely attuned to mid-range active weather forecasts. And you need to follow rapidly evolving research into the Atmospheric Rivers (capital letters to make you pay attention) that bring farmers massive amounts of water from the sky.
Anderson said 2016’s semi-fizzled El Niño likely denotes a new, troubling and undependable delivery system for atmospheric river water. The frequency, size and timing of the massive “Pineapple Express” flows of stormwater may be subject to sudden changes.
For water management software and irrigation devices, this means more attention to the forecasts, more alacrity in distribution and, of course, precision in the fields.
We’ll close with this chilling factoid: The average temperature for 2015 was 32 degrees, the first time at freezing, Anderson said.
In addition to managing water in droughts and deluges, you developers need to be temperature-sensitive, too. Why? Without sufficient “chill hours,” crops like cherries and wine grapes don’t grow.
We’ll talk more about this. Do some research! You could start here at Dr. Anderson’s official webpage.
