When the Eastern Washington Grape heart stopped beatting
About two weeks ago we got a hard freeze in Eastern Washington (see this post) and we are still not sure what are the long term consequences of this unusual weather event. One fact we know is that the weather stopped the growing season – drop dead. Below is the current GDD chart (see this post about the exciting world of Growing Degree Days):
Here you can see that 2009 (the black line) was behaving much like 2003 (warm year standard in red) until the freeze in early October and from then on there no degree days that have been recorded and we might end up close to the long term average (in teal). Pretty dramatic, no?
September 14th, 2010 at 1:09 pm
[...] frost event we had last year in early October (11th or so) which just stopped the growing season (See this link for this bad memory). It was OK last year because we had a warm year and were ahead, but it would be really ugly if [...]