The Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development, Agriculture and Food, recently launched a new online tool to help grain growers determine – without ever leaving the house – if their crops have been affected by extreme temperature events.
The Extreme Weather Events tool, which provides temperature information for specific locations, will help growers understand how their crop potential is affected by extreme weather events, like frost and heat stress.
The free, online tool draws on data from the department’s network of 177 weather stations to provide both real time and historical data.
Department research officer Meredith Guthrie said it was sometimes difficult for growers to know if and how severely their crops had been affected due to the variable nature of extreme weather events and increasingly large properties.
