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There’s a brand-new website called the Soil Temperature Climatology Tool that’s available to help Indiana farmers and agronomists regarding soil temperatures.
“Anytime you’re working with the soil and you need to understand or know patterns of our soil temperature, this tool is going to be beneficial to you,” says Melissa Widhalm, Associate Director and Regional Climatologist with the Midwestern Regional Climate Center—which is housed at Purdue University.
Widhalm explains why the Soil Temperature Climatology Tool was developed.
“Every Spring and every fall, we get inundated with people wanting to know, ‘When am I going to hit 50 degrees and stay above it so I can stick my crop in the ground?’ Or, ‘How much longer am I going to stay below 50 degrees so I can put my nutrients on the ground?’ Now we have a tool that takes 30 years of historical data and packages that into a really nice interface so we can get those questions answered really quickly and easily,” says Widhalm.
She hopes the new website becomes an outstanding asset for farmers and agronomists, as well as construction workers, foresters, and those who need access to historic soil temperature data.
“When can you expect some of these important milestone temperatures to happen? What’s the earliest they can happen? What’s the latest they can happen? What’s that window of opportunity that you might have that you need for planning? We’re talking about farming. It’s a big business and there are a lot of moving parts, and so if you can get some information that helps you hone in on what specific times of the year you might need to be taking these critical actions, you’re going to be one more step ahead of the game.”
Widhalm says the best part of using the new website is that it’s absolutely free!
“All of this data and information is coming from data sets that are already paid for by your tax dollars,” says Widhalm. “Our role is really just taking all of this wonderful federally available data and making sure that it can get into the hands of people who can make use of it.”
The Soil Temperature Climatology Tool is a partnership between the Midwestern Regional Climate Center and the USDA Midwest Climate Hub.
To access the Soil Temperature Climatology Tool, visit the Midwestern Regional Climate Center website at mrcc.purdue.edu.
