Source: Hans Schmitz, Purdue Extension Educator – Posey County<\/p>\n\n\n\n
With the cool temperatures soon to be behind us, now is the time to be checking plants for any sustained frost damage.\u00a0 When anticipating cold temperatures, many resources exist to evaluate the amount and area of cold expected.\u00a0 Weather and climate resources may be difficult to interpret once found, however.\u00a0 A lot of tabular data exists that may look better graphically, or a lot of graphics may have too much overlaid information to interpret easily.\u00a0 The Indiana State Climate Office (IN-SCO) has a new web site, found at ag.purdue.edu\/Indiana-state-climate<\/a><\/strong>.\u00a0 Our state climatologist, Dr. Beth Hall, now has over a year of experience in her position and continues to improve weather and climate monitoring resources in Indiana.\u00a0 Most of these resources can be found at the web site.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Perhaps the most important resource that the IN-SCO controls\nis the Purdue Mesonet. A mesonet is a\nmesoscale network of weather stations. \nThe mesoscale is a relatively small scale, meteorologically speaking,\nwith multiple stations covering a defined area, anywhere from a few stations\nper state, to a station per county, to even multiple stations per county. The Purdue Mesonet contains nine Purdue\nfarm-based stations around the state supported by the IN-SCO. In addition, the National Weather Service (NWS)\nmaintains 49 Automated Surface Observing Stations, usually located at airports\naround the state. The Indiana Water\nBalance Network (IWBN), maintained by the Indiana Geological and Water Survey\nat Indiana University, has 13 sites around the state with more on the way. These network stations are all installed and\nmaintained to National Weather Service specifications, which separates them\nfrom the backyard weather station that can upload information to private,\nonline weather services. Data from the\nmesonets are maintained separately, but NWS and Purdue farm data are accessible\nthrough the IN-SCO web site. The\nadvantage of the Purdue farm and IWBN mesonet data is the availability of\nvariables such as wind, soil temperature, humidity, and solar radiation,\nvariables less common from other weather station networks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In addition to near real-time weather data provided by the Purdue Mesonet, the IN-SCO provides regularly updated maps of the state for recent time periods depicting rainfall and temperature amounts, averages, and deviations from the climatological normal.\u00a0 In addition, a tools tab leads to Midwest Regional Climate Center products focused around drought, agriculture, winter, or the Great Lakes.\u00a0 Using this tab also provides some projects the IN-SCO has developed recently.\u00a0 For instance, after a period of more than seven days above 35 degrees Fahrenheit, the Evansville Museum station has never recorded a cold snap with a resultant temperature below 18 degrees.\u00a0 The average first fall freeze in Indianapolis occurs on November 3rd<\/sup>, although the trend line first freeze is predicting (with very low confidence) closer to November 8th<\/sup>.\u00a0 Since 1950, Indiana has experienced four F5\/EF5 tornadoes, the strongest tornado that exists.\u00a0 All four occurred in 1974. <\/p>\n\n\n\n