2025 Weather Patterns Taking Shape and Carrying Risk for Global Agriculture This Growing Season - DT David Tolleris

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[Yeager] Dry pattern. Wet pattern. In between. What's it looking like in the growing areas that we cover on market to market, as well as around the world? As we look for indicators of what areas are growing up? Possibly grow more or grow less because of what rainfall happens or hot conditions happen. We're going to go global today and talk about the weather. New guest to talk about the weather this week on the MtoM podcast I'm Paul Yeager DT. David Tolleries from WXRisk.com is our guest. We will focus in Eastern Corn Belt, Western Corn Belt, The Plains. Then we'll head south to South America, then India, Australia, China, Russia. You get the picture. We're going to go a lot of places. We're going to say is some very scientific things and then some very easy to understand and how important the next few weeks are going to be in the growing season. But I'm not telling you anything that you don't already know, but just here is something to think about and something to chew on as you look forward into the growing season. There's a couple of phrases and I bring it up towards the end of the discussion. Today we're going to talk about a rhino. We're going to talk about, the blocking ridge as well as the Dome of Doom in today's MTM podcast, which you can listen to right now. Did Ross Geller make you not be a, paleontologist when you watched Friends? Or was there a weather inspiration and why you went from, dinosaurs into weather?

[Tolleris] Yeah. You know, when you're growing up with a fairly large family, you know, in the late 60s and 70s, and you're telling people the size they were trying to sort of threats or the latest theory that some dinosaurs might have been primitively warm blooded. Nobody cares. But if you can tell them that, it might snow two days from now, people go, But so, you know, it is. You just it's a matter for me. It's originally a matter of getting, you know, attention and recognition and that actually then the other thing was, of course, begin to actually understand, predict the future when other people couldn't do that. So to me, you know, that's just you know, and that goes beyond meteorology. I mean, I do I mean, I follow global trends with, you know, ethanol mixing and history and other things going on there. So it's just being able to the meteorology thing is mostly just being able to be able to see the future. And that's, as always, sparked an interest in me and being able to see and predict trends when other people are going to do it. I'm a big black swan guy, you know, Nassim Taleb, I'm a big, you know, unpredictable, end of the bell curve type of guy. So I've always been that.

[Yeager] But you're not. You're not saying that you can predict the black swans. You just know science to where one might be fascinating.

[Tolleris] I mean, no sudden end of the black swan. You can predict. And actually a black swans there are I think they're called rhinos or gray rhinos because you should have seen them coming like for example, in his book The Black Swan, Taleb says on page 217, this was back in the 19 early 2000 when he first wrote the book, that there's going to be a global pandemic because of the way the world's interconnected, he says. It's inevitable. It's going to happen, and we're not prepared for it. I mean, he wrote that 20 years ago. That's not a bad prediction. That's reinforced. No.

[Yeager] It's not as if it is incredibly impressive. And the other thing is, David, are you we talk about black swans all the time, a market, but nobody ever calls that says the rhino is coming. that is, but that is something that I'll have to maybe slip that into my vernacular.

[Tolleris] Yeah, I look, it's one of the terms out there, you know, black swans, gray rhino or whatever. Sure. But yes, it's one of those storms out there. 

[Yeager] So, meteorology? 

[Tolleris] Yeah.

[Yeager] You did a little bit of time. understanding commodities. But for you, it's much more the weather. Let's first just tell me what weather risk is.

[Tolleris] We provide weather information to all types of businesses, organizations that need it. I mean, I do, you know, here in Virginia, the East Coast, I do a lot of ski resorts, I do construction companies, you know, and then I do some farming here, with the Virginia, grain producers here. But, you know, mostly I just my in my ability to see things and focus on the extended stuff. Day three, day seven, day ten, day 12. Day 30 is really important for people in all kinds of businesses. And that was the thing that surprised me about it when I first started out doing trading. I mean, construction has a demand for it. vineyards have a demand for it. I do a lot of Virginia vineyards, here in the Mid-Atlantic. You know, it's just the beside the ski resorts. So, you know, if if that's what's so interesting about it, and it's the problem is the TV stations are so bad at doing it and, you know, they and the reason there's a reason for that when you go to meteorology school, it's all about chasing tornadoes and severe thunderstorms. Okay. They don't spend a lot of time now that that's changed recently over some of the schools now picking up on those 5 or 10 years. But when I was undergrad, they kept telling people, you know, it's all about chasing tornadoes. And you couldn't do anything beyond three days. We didn't have the understanding. We didn't have the computing power. We couldn't do it now that we do. Okay. And now there's more focus on it. But that's what it was. I will chase tornadoes. Maybe you saw the movie twister, right? Both of them. The original one. You know, the noxious scientists get sucked up in the cloud and kill chasing a train. It. No. That's me. I'm not doing that.

[Yeager] Which means you would have been in Iowa because they filmed some of that in Iowa 30 years ago.

[Tolleris] Right.

[Yeager] Well, okay. Let's talk. you have shared with me before kind of your three month outlook. You talk about three days. Let's look at three months. We're kind of in the middle of that right now. We're in the middle of planting. I've had conversations with people in Ohio and, friends online. It's still wet. Their Eastern Corn Belt. Yes. Is that forecast coming true, that what you thought was going to happen? It was going to be wet?

[Tolleris] Yeah. I mean, I said that the Eastern Corn Belt is going to be great this year. No real problems. And that's the way it has been. They've been getting the rain. you know, some of the success of rain, like we saw a few weeks ago with the flooding in Arkansas, Tennessee and Kentucky. But the Eastern Corn Belt is much better. And if you look at the anomalies, you know, over the over the month of April, you'll see that no place like Nebraska, some places we've got have it in the month of April, haven't got an inch of rain or less. I mean, very dry now, south, north South Dakota that much better in April. There are areas that had two, three, five, six inches of rain. Iowa did pretty good, especially eastern Iowa. For April. They did pretty good. Missouri did great. Kansas not bad. They've had one of the one of April's a found record and Tulsa's had its wettest April ever. So did Oklahoma City on record. What is the Texas Panhandle done. Good. But now you notice we're changing here and we can begin to look a little drier. And if you look at like, you know, the anomalies for a may, they're quite dry in the West and for both the upper Plains, the not, you know, next seven days, there's no rain coming at all for the Western Corn Belt. or the other points at all, let's say, from Nebraska northward. And that's also applies to our friends in the Kane County and prairies.

[Tolleris] and then, we'll see what happens a week two. there's some indication there might be a pretty good rain event week two across, you know, Nebraska, Ohio. But I'm not certain about it. Yeah. But yeah, generally it's it's it my I like the spring forecast is shaping up from when I looked at it in late March. I like the way things are developing. And I still think we're looking at a pretty dry, July in August in a good portion of the Midwest.

[Yeager] How dry?

[Tolleris] You know, you mentioned dryness. The first thing that happens is somebody is going to mention 2012 and it just, you know, as a meteorologist, the drives are nuts. You see this with hurricanes and snow storms, you know, on the East Coast when everything is so stormy, like March 1999, the super storm now just just a snowstorm, okay. Just a snowstorm. It doesn't have to be the most extreme thing of all time. I guess it's because, you know, we're in the information age or the misinformation age, as the case may be. And, you know, they take the hurricane. It's going to be the biggest one of them. No. It's just you know, it's it's it's it's going to be caught fairly dry. I don't think it's going to be a disaster. But you know, I think if you're looking for trendline yields not seriously looking for trend line yields in July and August I compiled with that I don't think I don't see that happening. There are a lot of reasons for that happening. and we can get into those reasons. But I'm I, I'm doubtful that's going to happen.

[Yeager] Are there areas that are more apt to be trend-line or not be trend-line?

[Tolleris] The Corn Belt is looking great. I think they'll be trend line yields. I think they'll have a great crop. From what I'm saying, I don't see any reason why they're not. so I think they're in pretty good shape. so that may counterbalance what we see. See some loss in the Western Corn Belt. So that may end up, you know, averaging out. So and that's really what we're looking at here. We're not looking like 2012 which is disaster everywhere. You know we're look in areas where you're going to have regional dryness and some areas in the delta and the eastern Corn Belt all going be pretty good. Southeastern safely pretty good. But, you know, the western Corn Belt, the Upper Plains, Canadian prairies going to fall.

[Yeager] Weather to me always has patterns or things. And it seems to be if you get rain in spring, you'll get rain throughout the year. Is that am I making stuff up here?

[Tolleris] There's some science behind that because you also have the science. You know, drought begets drought before that too. so but if that's true, and we see how drought, I mean, you know, it's we the drought monitor. If you look at the latest drought monitor map, you'll see that the drought conditions in the plains will kind of shrinking a little bit because the recent rains now that's going to start picking up again because we are heading a dry week, ten days coming up. But yes, weather definitely runs in cycles. And, one of the things that we know is that you can predict these cycles to some degree out two weeks, three weeks, four weeks. So right now we are kind of stuck in a repeating weather pattern. And if you look at the maps for late March and April, we'll see that consistently. We keep getting this deep trough coming into California and the Rockies. And then the jetstream goes from there up towards Minnesota. And everybody east of that is, fairly well on the East Coast, the southeastern states. And then you storms keep going from California and Nevada across, up towards, you know, the, up across the country, and you end up getting, a very particular type of storm track, because guess what I'm trying to say here. And this pattern keeps repeating itself. So what's so a that's one of the reasons why we have such dry conditions in the upper Plains in February, March into early April before it began to change. Now we're starting to get more rains into the upper plains, but I'm not sure if that's going to hold. there are the things going on, the atmosphere, which are kind of forcing the pattern to remain the same. And, we need something to change the atmosphere on a global scale to get some pattern to change in the US so we can get back to a normal rainfall forecast. So, that's not.

[Yeager] Is this a is this a La Nina El Nino?

[Tolleris] Well, we have this, though. The La Nina is officially dead. So there are a couple things going on here. there is a pool of large, cold water which has developed off the west coast of North America, off of Baja and the west coast of Mexico that extends southwest toward towards the equator. This pool of cold water is known as a negative phase of the PM Pacific. Maradona mode is a positive phase and a cold phase to it, and a we. When you have a cold phase to it, it produces La Nina light conditions. Even if you don't have La Nina. So, that's been going on for a while, and that's one reason why we turn quite dry in the Western Corn Belt, in the plains in February and March, because of this cold pool. Now that's continuing. That hasn't changed. So that's one factor, which is it's creating La Nina light conditions, even though we're technically not La Nina. So that's one thing. Another factor is another thing called the amp, which is the, atmospheric angular momentum. Okay, without getting too technical about this, this is a relatively new thing. The Earth has a rotation and the atmosphere spins around the Earth. It has location. And sometimes when the atmosphere goes over mountains and over the land, the atmosphere rotation changes are shifts. So you have two different forces at work, the Earth's rotation or the atmosphere around the Earth. And when you get into a negative phase in the air and when it drops down, that means it's low energy, the atmosphere, and you keep getting repeating patterns. You don't get big coal. The mass is plunging south. You don't get a lot of energy coming north. It's just a repeating oscillating pattern, certain range. And that's where you are now. We've been that since March, so there's nothing going on the atmosphere to force a big change. And the other aspect of that is, of course the MJO, the Matty and Julian oscillation.  Now, this is a lot of people know about because it has eight different phases. Each phase corresponds to a particular type of temperature and precipitation pattern in the US, in Australia and South America, in China and India, that's a very pronounced influence. If the MJO is actually thunderstorms convection which forms in the Indian Ocean, it travels along the equator towards South America. And as it moves across, it goes to different phases. And that that energy changes and alters the jet stream. Now, for the past 30 days, the MJO has been sleeping out like a light stop and what we call the neutral circle. And the data shows the next 30 days. It's not changing either. So it's still stuck in the neutral circle. So that's another thing that can cause the atmosphere to change. It's not happen. So we're stuck in a quiet, normal cycle, which means that you're, you know, getting that kind of pattern where it's very normal and it keeps repeating. And you know, we haven't we had big storm the the rains we had yesterday, the day before in the Lower Plains and Texas Panhandle and New Mexico and Oklahoma. Those are good rains that came from a big system which came into California in in early in April and early May. You look at these giant lows crashing into Southern California. But that's what they've been getting. They keep getting it. We have there was another one, another one coming next week.

[Yeager] So we always like to talk about years a pattern. You already mentioned 2012, but is there been another year where this type of pattern has set up where it rains in the southern, Plains?

[Tolleris] I'm actually just start looking at that. I, just started looking at the sea. I don't know that offhand. I know I couldn't tell you by the 2012 calls, you know, people just going crazy.

[Yeager] I know it comes up on Market a lot. People are always talking about it, but they talk about that all the time. So it's not just year specific. Yeah, yeah. you mentioned, an area to watch, but I've also heard to look at the Gulf of Alaska is as a predictor for more of the, the, the Western Corn Belt. Is that anything to look at?

[Tolleris] Yeah. Yes it is. The way the pattern is shaping is, these that energy coming into California is actually dropping down from the Gulf of Alaska, dropping down from Anchorage, down the coast, British Columbia, the West Coast, down to Southern California. When that is happening, when you get a trough in the eastern Pacific and right along the West coast, North America, there's going to be a ridge downstream. Basic laws of physics for reaction. There's an opposite in that actual reaction. So for every trough, there's a ridge. For every ridge there's a trough. So when the trough is on the west coast of North America for British Committee California, that places your ridge all the way up to the eastern Rockies, the Canadian Prairies, and, and the Plains. And that's why you don't get your rain. I mean, the rainfalls to fall in really far behind the Canadian prairies. And they got nothing coming up for the next ten, 12, 14 days. So that's going to be that's an issue in this pattern. They're not going great. so they an okay winter but they're not going to in this pattern. So far the moisture levels and the Carnegie prairies are doing okay. They're not bad, but it's not not getting it. The point is, that kind of pattern doesn't bring rain to the upper plains. And it's not great for the Western Corn Belt. So yes, when you have that energy in the Gulf, Alaska, down to California, Oregon, Washington downstream, that causes problems. That's absolutely correct. Yes. And that's what you mentioned.

[Yeager] A couple of you mentioned a couple of other countries. I guess let's go South America, since you'd mentioned the equator first. What's that weather pattern here looking like in the next three months for Brazil and Argentina?

[Tolleris] Well, they're doing okay. they've had a very wet April. Normally, as you go into eight. Well, what happens is rainfall amount amounts, you know, in the corn areas in Brazil, the second corn crop, the rainfall drops off and that grows so and Goya's talking to ants in those areas. that didn't happen. They've actually had a really nice April with a lot of areas, relatively speaking, above normal rainfall. So they're doing pretty good. And I think they're looking fine here. I don't see any reason to anticipate it. Like, you know, July is their January. So in Southern hemisphere where they get their best chances are frost, rain like that, I don't see any reason to dissipate. Something like that's going to happen. I think they're in for a pretty normal next three months there. So I think they're okay. Australia looks pretty good. I don't see any problems there. The farms that are developing is, is in Europe. north western Europe has have been very dry for a long period of time. they have to grab drought conditions developing there and some crop and some crop stress on western northern France, Ukraine, the western Ukraine has been very dry. They have a lot of crops. Best they're, the Volga district in Russia, down by Kazakhstan. They're doing pretty bad with a lot of stress there. Now, the one area is doing really well as a southern district towards the Caucasus, the Black Sea. They've had great rains recently doing outstanding. So that part of Russia is doing great. But as soon as you go north, that is not a raindrop. So it's just the one area doing great rain. Everybody else is awful, but it's one of those. It's just one of those things that happens. A lot of patterns.

[Yeager] Well, is that enough of an impact on I mean, let's try a little, commodities here together. Is that enough to impact a wheat market or a corn? or growing in that region?

[Tolleris] Well, yeah. Now for the in the U.S., winter wheat with those rice rains we've had, they're doing great. That winter wheat crop in the U.S. is looking great. Okay. But the European and the Russian wheat crop is not looking that good. So, they have they there are problems, but is enough to counter the winter wheat in the U.S.. No, I think, the right now in the U.S., particularly, the market's been saying, well, the winter wheat crop looks pretty good. Okay. They've got farms in France, they got farms in Russia, they've got problems Ukraine. But right now the winter wheat crop looks really good. So I think the market.

[Yeager] Last year watching the Tour de France, we got to see firsthand on some of those incredible aerial pictures of the race, how dry it was in some of those wheat areas. Are we looking at a year or two there?

[Tolleris] Yes. Yeah. And that's what look like. Definitely. And that's one of the areas you look at as well. Let's talk about the Atlantic Ocean now as you know, there's been a lot of talk recently about how warm be landing has been its impact on the hurricane season. Well, if you look at the sea surface temperatures right now, that's not true. The Atlantic right now is the coldest, has been in several years and one of the coldest since the year 2000. The only the eastern Atlantic off the coast of Africa in the tropics below normal. And now we haven't seen that. Like I said, several years, the one area where it's really warm is in northeast portions of the North Atlantic, Iceland, Ireland, Great Britain, France, Spain. They have a lot of warm ocean water temperatures there and that produces extra energy. The atmosphere, which is anchoring the ridge in Great Britain and western France, which is why they're not getting the rain. So yes, there was a direct connection between the ocean water temperatures and the atmosphere. And as long as that water in the northeast Atlantic, it means that warm the pattern in Western Europe is not going to change. So the two things are definitely connected.

[Yeager] Let's move to the East. China.

[Tolleris] Yeah.

[Yeager] What are we looking at there?

[Tolleris] Well, you know that they haven't. I guess you've seen that they've had extreme heat in India and they've had some heat in China, but not nearly the same degree. They're doing okay, but are they kind of locked into a pattern right now? And again, it would be really useful for them to get into a different energy phase because the MgO definitely affects India, China. And right now it's not doing anything. So they're stuck in the same phase here. They got some problems in northern China. Nothing severe but it's getting a little, you know dry in some areas. So that's something to watch. Southern China looks okay especially south of the Yangtze River. you know, but they it's because of the climatology. They are even if they have dry two weeks, they get one wet week there. They have enough rain for the next 60 days. It's a southern China just for us. Rain all the time. But that's just the climatology there. But northern China, the North China plain, they do. They've got a few problems. You know if this continues another 30 days I might be more serious. so we'll see. You know, if they can't, if they can't get we can't change the pattern. By the time we get thing of June, things could be more of a problem in northern China. But right now, that's okay. It's just something to watch.

[Yeager] I love a map of 7 to 10 days, but let's talk 60 to 120 around the world. What has the most volatility for weather that is, is one of those unknowns we don't quite have but need to watch.

[Tolleris] Yeah. Well, obviously I think France, the European grain is, is is an issue that has to be watched. And we just talked about that also, the Russia, the Kazakhstan area, the Volga district, that that's a problem. The Canadian prairies, I guess. I don't know if it's a global area, but, you know, it should be mentioned. They're looking very dry. They're looking quite warm. and I don't see a lot of rain in the forecast for the next 30 days or beyond. I think they're going to have a problem. And it's pattern. Lots of changes. and, one of the area Australia looks okay. Doesn't look like any problems there. India is also a very hot start. There are some, I, there's some indication the monsoon there is going to start soon, usually start to June. So that should be the case. right now the monsoon in India looks about normal. Does not look bad. Unless, of course, you know, Pakistan and India start dropping bombs on each other. Then the whole thing's off. But what? You know. oh. Well, so, but those are the areas.

[Yeager] Well, that's the stuff you're not predicting…

[Tolleris] No, no. Yeah, I do say that one.

[Yeager] I will let that one be. And I get what you're saying.

[Tolleris] Yeah, there's some concern in northern China, but it's not a big issue yet. But 30 days from now might be things don't change.

[Yeager] All right. Do you follow agriculture? Just enough to know to be dangerous in this question. But does the market react differently than it did maybe at the beginning of your career than it does now to whether locally versus whether globally?

[Tolleris] The reaction time is fast because the models come out faster. So, you know, when I first started out, you know, the GFS, what was going on for seven days? there's 25 years ago. So there, you know, was that and, I don't know. Sure. If it was the GFS, it might have been called the MRF. And back then, and the European model had just come out and people didn't know whether it was accurate or whether it was where it was. So, and of course, for most of the last 15 years, the heavy emphasis had been on the GFS, the American one model, because it's really accessible. People can find it everywhere. It comes out four times a day. and but on the other hand, that also caused the problem because, you know, you have one model running which says you're going to get two inches of rain in Iowa, and then the next all model one comes out and says, sunny and all the rain is in southern Missouri. You know, like, what the heck happen now? What? How do you trade that? You know, the market's way down and then and the open up and then the rain disappears. Oh it's off again. You know they caused a lot of volatility. Now the GFS has got a little better. and there are other models out there. So we have that. So that helps. the new improvements the GFS, the instability has gone away to some degree. So that helps. also the European models had several upgrades and the information comes out earlier on the European and sooner. So that can get in, you know, so you, you can say, well, it's going to rain this much. It changes. What's the European looking at? it's got about the same amount of rain. So I can stick with the forecast. You know, that helps a little bit, too. So, you know, the new technologies and the upgraded computing power has made a difference in terms of how we, as meteorologists get the forecast out to farmers and traders. So that is one thing that's really changed over the last 20, 25 years.

[Yeager] And let's face it, we all look at services like yours, and we all might have six weather apps that we look at, and we kind of play junior meteorologists for our own neighborhood to figure out what our farm plan, construction plan, and grain marketing plans should be.

[Tolleris] Well, now the weather apps are your interesting story. I went into that a long time. you know, and operationally, when I'm doing my the winter weather stuff, you know, the weather app will come out. We'll have, you know, six inches of snow here, and then the app, it's got one if you know what the heck happened, you know, and then it causes all sorts of problems and the, you know, then you'll see, the weather app, it will show, 40 degrees and snow. And then people start yelling, how can the weather app 40 degrees and snow? Well, yeah, but that's because you don't look at the forecast. The 40 degrees might be at 1:00 in the morning for the cold front fronts and temperatures are dropping all day. So when the snow starts it might be 31 degrees. you know, part of the problem I get, people ask me all the time, I don't have a weather app. The answer is no. I think the weather app store the next for the next two days, the weather app store. Okay, okay. And the weather apps are really useful for carrying thunderstorm warnings, watches, tornado warnings, all kinds of severe weather there. Great. Okay. Beyond 2 or 3 days, they're not good because, the same reason why the TV weather people aren't very good. You know, I can't tell you ten days from now whether the temperature in Des Moines, Iowa, is going to be 80 or 79. It doesn't work that way. Okay, I can tell you what. It'll be seasonal or above one below normal. Okay. And that sort of stuff, you know. Yeah, it's probably going to be around 80. If anything, I might be biased towards the high by a couple of degrees. So, you can tell me that and I can tell you, you know, if we get do a hot summer pattern. Yeah. It looks like you're going to get to 95 by the end of the week at several locations in Iowa. So that's. But I can't you can't go, you know, specific temperatures. It doesn't work. It doesn't work on the weather app. It doesn't work on the TV stations. So, you know yeah to me I don't.

[Yeager] Oh yeah. And I don't get it bent out of shape if it's 80 versus 75 that that to me five degrees I give that that that's what's going to happen. It's the, a couple weeks ago we had this possible tornado activity at a certain point and all these activities canceled. And it ends up barely the sidewalk getting wet. And it’s just that's what frustrates people and maybe almost to the point of saying, well, that's your credibility down the tubes there. See, those meteorologists don't have it, whether they're looking at the app. And that's within I'm not talking six days. I'm talking six hours.

[Tolleris] What we're looking at here. Right. Well, you know, so that, that does happen from time to time. And, that's just the nature of the variability of the year. You know.

[Yeager] Oh, I get it now.

[Tolleris] Because, remember, people do remember when you're dealing with the atmosphere, you young, with two forces, not one. The atmosphere consists of the the oxygen, the air, the the gases and the water vapor. Okay. So we're dealing with two different forces here. You don't have the oxygen, the carbon dioxide, nitrogen, you know, and actual water vapor in the atmosphere. So you have two different forces going on here. It's not just one. That would mean that's what makes weather forecasting particularly difficult. And it also is a science that has more interaction with humans in any other science, regular basis. I mean, you may have like astronomy, but, you know, unless you're going to look at the sky and it doesn't interact with you every single day, weather does. So people so you have a much, you know. And the other thing about meteorology is that when you make a mistake, everybody knows about that and everybody knows about that.

[Yeager] Oh isn't it the case? And just think if you. Yeah, if you were on, on television doing what you were doing. Yeah, you would certainly not hear the end of it. I know I worked with meteorologists. Going to the grocery store was always miserable. but I know how important it is. And I know that we all care tremendously. All right, final thing here, DT. Let's just look, let's recap again. Corn Belt and its growing eastern Western look like they're going to have two different stories this year. You mentioned the higher temperatures. We look like we're going to get warmer faster here at least in Iowa and Minnesota, I've seen some friends post. That gets to be a concern when you get to be 85 in May than in June. We get that. So what's my highlight that I got to look out for here in the next 30 days?

[Tolleris] Well, okay. So, the generally the pattern looks for next 30 days, it's going to be a drier than normal in the Western Corn Belt in the upper Plains. This week in particular looks really dry. There may be a significant rain event in the Central Plains through the heart of the Midwest in week two. We're still trying to figure that out if that's going to happen or not. And then week three and week four also go back to being dry. There is a significant blocking ridge which is developing the jet stream, as what that means. It's essentially a bubble of really warm air. Okay. blocking high. during the summer months, a blocking ridge can become the Dome of Doom that sits over Iowa, Nebraska. That's not what this is, but this is a blocking ridge where the ridge is going from. The jet stream is going from California to Saskatchewan or to the Great Lakes, and then down towards New England. That lots of blocking ridge and it sits to the north. And what it does is it forces all the precipitation to sink to the south and allows temperatures to warm up underneath the ridge. So that's what's keeping the Canadian prairies dry. and that's what's keeping the upper plains in the Western Corn Belt dry. So, that's going to be an issue for the next ten days. like I said, we may get that rain event in week two, which would be nice rain event to get. But then week three, week four looks like it goes back to the same pattern. So, May's a very critical month here because if we get a lot of rain, we get more rain than we think in the Western Corn Belt. it's going to give us a little bit of, you know, maneuvering room when it gets drawings, line oils. but if we don't. Okay, then we have and we have. That means we have. We have problems. June becomes even more critical for July and August. So, you know, May's an important month here, especially for these dry areas and the western Corn Belt in the upper Plains. We need eight. We need another May to be like April. That's what we really need.

[Yeager] And see how it unfolds. I have to admit, you're the new terms today. I've learned rhino blocking ridge and the Dome of Doom.

[Tolleris] Yeah, I haven't heard that one before. The dome? That's right. That's on the 1988, you know, heat wave before 2012. Well, that one back there was a dome of the 88.

[Yeager] One was the famous one. I remember that.

[Tolleris] Glossed over being even two, just like 2012. So yes.

[Yeager] DT thank you so much. Great to meet you. Appreciate your insight.

[Tolleris] Anytime, anytime. Let me know. I'm always willing to do something like this.

[Yeager] My thanks to DT and thanks to you for watching, listening or reading new episodes of this podcast. Come out each and every Tuesday. We will see you next time. Bye bye.

Contact: paul.yeager@iowapbs.org