Climate Dashboard for Corn Growers

The North Carolina State Climate Office recently developed an online dashboard to specifically support North Carolina corn growers’ needs for weather and climate information. This dashboard enables users to view contextualized forecast and historical climatological information, tailored to their location, and designed to facilitate weather- and climate-affected decision-making at time scales of days to months. We additionally conducted analyses to provide guidance to growers on longer-term trends and relationships between atmospheric variables (e.g., precipitation and temperature) and corn growth in a changing climate.

This project consisted of three key components designed to systematically meet the 2021 priorities for Weather and Climate outlined by the Corn Growers Association of North Carolina:

1. Identify end-users’ needs for short- to long-term weather and climate information;
2. Develop a dashboard and research analyses that enable users to visualize and explore weather and climate information to support management decisions for the current season as well as longer-term strategic planning; and
3. Evaluate the resulting online dashboard and research products in terms of their usability and usefulness.

This project was supported by the Corn Growers Association of North Carolina with lead PI Dr. Ronnie Heiniger in NC State University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and co-PI Rebecca Ward and lead developer John McGuire from the NC State Climate Office. The project period was February 2021 – January 2022.