(FARGO, ND) — As we near the end of June, we continue to see heat across much of the eastern half of the U.S. as a front slowly moves through the Plains and Upper Midwest. How much impact will this heat have on crops as we end the month? Will it be helpful or a hinderance?
Eric Snodgrass, Principal Atmospheric Scientist with Nutrien Ag Solutions, believes we could see a quickly developing situation for dryness if the heat is prolonged. “When you hunt down the different atmospheric drivers, mainly we’re looking at a lot of ocean temperature correlations. And they do point toward drier central United States in July. But, you know, these same drivers have been around for a while,” according to Snodgrass. “I’m talking about fading La Nina, the cold water off the coast of California, the, you know, the temperatures in the Atlantic, all of it does. Yet the atmosphere outdid all of those drivers in spring, giving us this record wet spring in, you know, the mid-south to the southern plains. So there’s, I think there’s a lot of uncertainty in all of this.”
He also adds that he feels the markets have no weather premium currently, but that could change quickly. “I would tell you that I feel as though the markets, there’s no weather premium in the markets right now, but I would just tell you that that story could come on in a heartbeat and all of a sudden we may be staring down the barrel of a weather premium based off of either too much rain in some places and not enough in others. So I would just say that I don’t expect July to do anything different than spring did. And what I mean by that is I expect it to be nature disparity high across geography and across time, major differences in precipitation and temperature.”
Snodgrass also mentioned the long range forecast for July has a drier Canadian Prairie, which extends down into the Northern Plains and parts of the Central Plains and Western Corn Belt.
Listen to the full conversation from the Market Talk Weekly Weather Update with Eric Snodgrass below:
