It’s June, and that means it’s hot. But how hot is hot? Well, for that question, we turn to North Carolina Assistant State Climatologist Corey Davis. We expect it to be warm this time of year, after all it is climatological summer now. But let’s take a look at some averages and see, because today it looks like the thermometer is going to be way on up there. Corey, tell us about it.
“We’ve been seeing these borderline 90 degree days for the past month or so. Remember, in the Raleigh area, we had our first 90 degree day of the year in the second week of May. So this type of warmth is nothing new. But what is new is the sort of heat that we’re going to see today in over parts of the next week. Again, just for some context, this time of the year in the middle of June, our average high temperatures are in the upper 80s. Right around 90 degrees in some spots.”
What about on crops? What are what can we expect to see there? What are farmers seeing?
“So anytime you see these temperatures start getting above 90, and especially 95 degrees, that really does have an impact on the productivity of the crops out there. In some cases, they just won’t be growing as quickly. We talked last week about corn how when it gets on these hot summer days, it’ll start to roll the leaves in the afternoon to protect themselves from getting too much sunlight. And also of course, hot days with no precipitation means your soil moisture is going to start drying up as well. And in particular, for corn. When you start stacking up these hot and dry days back to back, you can start to see reduction of one or 2% of your overall yield.”