 Our next speaker is Dr. Eric Snodgrass. Dr. Snodgrass is the Principal Atmospheric Scientist for Nutrient Egg Solutions, where he develops predictive analytical software solutions to manage weather risk for global production agriculture. He provides frequent weather updates that focus on high, on how high impact weather events influence global agriculture productivity. So right now I'd like to introduce him. Thank you. I appreciate the invitation to come out here today and talk about weather. It was kind of an interesting go of it. I was in Tampa yesterday, where it was 83 degrees. And when I, the U.S. Rain Council had a meeting and I was speaking at that meeting and when I flew in last night, I just really met with a brutal South Dakota colder outbreak and I was not ready for it. I usually wear suits when I speak, but my suit is not rated for one of your colder outbreaks. So I threw jeans in and a pullover today, if you don't mind. It was kind of funny, the last night when I got to the airport, I had to tweet this out just for the fun of it, but I ran into a guy who had just gone off the plane. I don't know where from, but wearing short sleeves and wouldn't grab himself while we're waiting for luggage, wouldn't grab himself a frozen popsicle and he's sitting there eating it and he had an epic mustache, by the way, this guy. I think that's what he was using to keep himself warm because he left and walked outside with no coat on and I was just like, geez, these people are tough. Where I came from in Tampa, I'll show you a few minutes. They had a windshield advisory about two weeks ago where the windshield advisory was for windshields to hit 35 degrees and my whole thinking here was like, this is shorts and t-shirt weather for the north central planes of the United States. So, to be honest with you, the thing that's been running through my mind most about this cold snap you had in seeing some of the pictures, and I got some great footage of some of the stuff in this talk today, was it made me go back to one of my favorite books I've read about weather and I'm sure that all of you were taught about this when you were in school, but there's a great book written called The Children's Blizzard. If you all talk about The Children's Blizzard of January of 1888, gosh, if you've not, what a phenomenal story about survival and about how the human body handles cold. It turns out we're much better handling cold than we are extreme heat. And that book, I found a friend of mine recommended to me and I just picked it up and I read the whole thing in one sitting on a Sunday and I found myself by the end of it in Champaign, Illinois, which is where I live, like wrapped in blankets. The book made me cold and it was like September when I read it, so. Anyways, we're gonna get back to talking about cold a little bit, but I wanna give you a theme for what we're gonna be talking about today. When I think about successful producers, when I think about those farmers that I eat, that year on year hits huge yields, year on year we're able to be more resilient with the way that weather is constantly causing risk in our industry. I think about the people that are the most observant, the ones that collect the most data, that analyze it and make systematic adjustments to what they do. And it reminds me of some great stories of people that have done this in other businesses. And I'm just curious if any of you know who this first guy is on my slides here, have I seen this guy before, heard of him? Anybody recognize the picture in the background? All right, that's guy's name is Paul Tudor Jones. And if I could give you an assignment tonight, I want you to go to YouTube when you get home. I want you to Google, or not Google, but YouTube, Paul Tudor Jones. There's a 30 minute documentary about this guy and what I love about the documentary is how he took what was seemed to be, seemed to be a very simple analysis and turned it into a decision-making process by which he tripled his money in about six months. You see, what he is famous for doing was back in the mid-1980s, he was looking at some very interesting data sets. The one that's over there on the left hand or the right hand side, excuse me, is what was going on at the Dow Jones Industrial Average in the 1980s. What he was seeing here was that the pattern was repeating exactly what was going on during the roaring 20s. And the correlation was so incredibly high that he had to look at what was driving the upward trends and was relating to the things that had happened in the 1920s. And he says, you know what? The bottom's gonna fall out of this probably sometime in 1987, if this correlation holds true. Now this was before we had supercomputers doing work for us. This was before everybody had a computer in their pocket that could do this kind of analysis. And he and his team were looking at these things and they made a decision, they made an evidence-based decision that they needed to short the market in a huge way. And when the bottom of this fell out in 1987, in fact, if you just kinda look here at what I've got, the thing that he was comparing was the run-up that you see, whoops, excuse me, the run-up that you see right here to what was going on right there. This is a logarithmic axis, which is why it looks smaller. But the correlation was uncanny and he bet everything right at that point, and like I said, tripled his money. Thinking on this same theme, come over to right here, this is the big housing collapse that we had. If you'd like to watch another great movie on decision makers that make decision based on some interesting evidence, go watch The Big Short. I'm just curious, how many of you have seen this movie? Good, you need to watch it, it's a fantastic film. When we think about the aspect of weather in all of this, just like those, that movie and Paul Tudor Jones, we had people that were making decisions about a system that was nonlinear and chaotic. And that simply means when something is behaving in a nonlinear and chaotic way, that very small changes can often upset the system for quite some time. The animation you're watching here in the background is water vapor in Earth's atmosphere. And you can see the fluid motion of our atmosphere. For us in my business, we often see things like hurricanes or colder outbreaks or a change in the strength of the Brazilian Monsoon or Almenolania or a shift in the pull of vortex that sometimes may seem like a minute change overall, but it disrupts our weather patterns for a long time. I was talking to somebody that doesn't work in agriculture a couple of weeks ago about risk. And I said, it's amazing, the industry I work in is only about risk management. You know, in agriculture, you have risk from global news, you have risk in the markets, you have risk in weather. And all three of those systems are nonlinear and chaotic. I mean, what do you mean by nonlinear and chaotic? But I explained what I just said to you, but then I decided to show in this video. I'm not sure if you all saw this come out the other day on social media, but sometimes these small little changes can cause big outcomes. For example, there was this video of a cat watching television here and swipes on the other side, like he's completely on the top. And I said, this is the kind of thing that sometimes happens in ag. And no, it's not a cat swiping on the TV screen, but these little things seem to have these very strange correlations with the how the weather sometimes changes or a tweet might change the outcome of the markets or we might hear some news from China or we might have a change in market behavior that's hard to explain. So we'll stop watching cats and start talking about that. The beauty of my, the beauty of what I do here is that I work in an era where we have instant access to weather systems over the world. And it's because of a satellite network that was launched at the end of the Cold War. These are our geostationary satellites and since the 1970s, they have been monitoring Earth's weather systems with incredible precision and timing. Modern day, these instruments are able to collect pictures of Earth every single minute at super high resolution. The advantage that I have over my predecessors is that at any given time, I can be watching the weather anywhere on Earth. And it's a crutch and at the same time, it helps. Why is it a crutch? My predecessors, the people that trained me in what I do did not have access to this kind of stuff. And as a result, they were much better about going outside, looking up at the clouds, seeing how things have been behaving the last couple of days and making a phenomenal forecast. I'm reliant on stuff like you see here to make forecasts. But we have a massive advantage with being able to observe the weather the way we do. In this particular animation, you're watching Hurricane Katrina. Weather doesn't surprise us any more like it used to. And in this animation, I'm taking you back to 2005, you're gonna watch the birth of Hurricane Katrina. It began over the Bahamas as a tropical depression where it rapidly gained strength. You're gonna see it right here over the Bahamas. The ocean temperatures were very, very warm. The, excuse me, the summer of 2005. Katrina got its name right here. It was upgraded to a tropical storm. That's when we give these things names. And it went racing across the southern tip of Florida doing something we don't often see hurricanes doing. And that is strengthening over land. Usually land knocks them out, but the Everglades, so much water down there in over the land provided enough to really crank this one up. Katrina got over the very warm Gulf of Mexico, extracted that heat, went from a category two strength hurricane that you see right here. And in a few moments, you'll watch an eye emerge as it hits category three, four, and right about now, cat five. Sustained winds in the eye of this hurricane or in the eye wall, 175 miles an hour. This was an impressive hurricane. You see, the amazing thing about it is that when it was over the Bahamas, we started warning people in New Orleans. They have four days knowledge about this event happening. And that's where we are right now when it comes to weather. Now, how do we turn this into strategy? I'm gonna talk one more thing about hurricanes just because I'm in North or South Dakota, so might as well talk hurricanes, right? A few years ago, back in 2017, I got a phone call. It was from one of my clients. This is a large retail operation. And they have a bunch of stores in Florida. And that circulation you see sitting there right over Puerto Rico was Hurricane Irma. And Hurricane Irma had a forecast track by some of our best global models to hit Florida. Some of our models will run up to 51 simulations at one time to see all of the eventual outcomes of a particular system, in this case, Hurricane Irma. So the phone call early in the morning said, hey, what do we need to do to prepare for this? What do we need to do about personnel? What do we need to do about our stores? And I said, wait, we need to think way more strategically about what this hurricane is gonna do. And they said, what are you talking about? And I said, well, by the next day, we knew that the National Hurricane Center was likely gonna be forecasting a major category three or above hurricane that's gonna go right up the gut of Florida. And I told them it doesn't even matter if it doesn't hit. And I was like, well, what are you talking about? I said, what I'm talking about is this. This is a graph that goes from 1900 to 2019. And it shows Florida's population change. Now, what was unique about Florida leading up to Irma was that the 12 years before it, Florida had not been hit by a hurricane. And during that time period, Florida's population grew by the size of Chicago. That's a lot of new construction. That's a lot of untested new citizens. That's a lot of brand new palm trees that have never seen a hurricane force wind. I said, this is so simple. Don't worry about those other things just yet. You have five days put every single generator that you own in your distribution centers on a truck and send it to Florida. People will buy them on the fear of this. Now, this is where I made the strategic mistake. I hung up the phone and realized I should have said, and I'd like 1% of the sales. They sent down 20 truckloads sold out of all of them three days before the hurricane got there. And when it did go through, it did cause quite a bit of damage. By the way, if you'd like some good stock advice, I can give you at least one thing to think about tested on me, okay? Before every major winter storm, especially ice storm, the first one of the season, go buy Generac stock. Generac is based out of Wisconsin. Their stock almost always skyrockets about three days before a big ice storm was forecast for a major metropolitan area. Sell it the day before the ice storm hits. Or first major hurricane of the year that's gonna hit a major metropolitan area, buy it. September of 2017 saw a huge increase from 36 bucks to $52 on Generac stock because of all those hurricanes. So something to think about there. By the way, when this did finally hit Florida, it went up the coast of here. And as it went up the west coast of Florida, on the northern side of it, the winds were off shore. And because they were off shore, they actually sucked the water out of Tampa Bay. So I was just in Tampa Bay twice this week, and I was talking to my Uber driver. She says, you're never gonna believe this. She did not know I was a meteorologist. She goes, you're never gonna believe this. When this hurricane came through, it sucked all the water out. And I said, well, what did you do? She goes, well, I went out there and I was combing the beaches and I'm like, yeah. She goes, that wasn't a good idea. And I'm like, I wouldn't imagine because that water does come back eventually. And so she says, yeah, I kind of ran whack in when it was coming back, but it was incredible. Just sucked it out. And I said, you know, I study risk. And she says, yeah. And I said, I'm gonna tell you something and you need to understand this. Cause she had just told me, she goes, you know, I've never evacuated when they tell me to evacuate. I was like, I just write them out. And I'm like, yeah, have you been okay? So far as you go, we've had damage, but so far so good. And I'm sitting there, my mind going, if the government told me to evacuate, it's not for their good, it's for mine and I would have been gone. And I said, well, I'm gonna be honest with you. If there's one place in the United States that is most vulnerable to the first trillion dollar weather disaster, it's Tampa. There's three million people that live in an elevation between zero and 10 feet above sea level. Storm surge on a hurricane that goes north of Tampa will completely level the place. And that's my projection of where it's gonna be. The winds were pretty strong in the south side of it though. This guy decided to go outside, measured 117 miles an hour, which is quite impressive. I don't know how he stood up against it, but maybe CrossFit helped him out, I'm not sure. By the way, Disney had to shut things down. Disney is very well protected against weather like this. They buy what are called weather derivatives because if Disney is not open, every day they could lose between 60 and 80 million dollars in revenue. That's just from people crossing the border, not the hotel, not just people going into the place between 60 and 80 million dollars a day when this happens. So that's an interesting bit of strategy. But this comes back to the main point of my talk today. Things don't sneak up on us like they used to. And in 1900, Galveston, which is in Texas near Houston, was wiped out by what is now known as the deadliest weather event in U.S. history up to this point. 8,000 people killed by this massive hurricane. And when it came through, about five people knew that it was coming 24 hours in advance and they were unsure. And as it plowed through here, it changed weather forever because we understood at this point in the history of meteorology that weather was not local and that we could predict its future behavior. Now since then, things have changed dramatically. Had a great conversation with Rich and Rich up here a few moments ago, we were talking about tornadoes. And this is a simulation that was just completed two years ago on one of the supercomputers at the University of Wisconsin. That is a supercell. You're flying through one in a simulation inside of a supercomputer where every ounce of the computing resources was used to make this simulation. These are the violently rotating storms that produced large tornadoes. Back in 1962, which we were discussing, these are the kind of storms that went racing across this part of the country and caused all of those nasty storms that went right through here causing some damage. Not only can we now simulate these things and get better predicting them, but we can also do this. This is a fine scale simulation at the base of a tornado. Beginning in the 1980s, but really taking off in the 90s and early 2000s, we were getting very close to these massive tornadoes with radar, mobile Doppler radar. We chase them and we get close and scan them. And when we scan them, we started to find that within these tornadoes, we were confirming some very interesting evidence about their behavior in that oftentimes the circulation within the tornado was made up of several smaller vortices, as we call them. Some of them are only maybe 30 to 100 feet wide, but they spin at 100 to 200, maybe even 300 miles an hour. So you've all heard stories about how tornadoes go through communities and they wipe out that house and they miss this house and they take the one next to it. It's because the internal workings of a tornado is kind of like an egg beater. They're sometimes composed of dozens of smaller circulations which we can't see with the naked eye because the whole thing is full of dust and debris and cloud. But we're making some rapid advancements in our ability to observe and model and understand these incredible phenomena which do affect what we do every single day. But what's amazing is with all of these technological innovations and the way we've changed our strategy about weather, we still have a heck of a time predicting it. And this is what we need to talk about today. This is one of my favorite graphics. I've been showing this ever since the World Series. One of my colleagues decided to explain how it is that we make weather forecast with models in this graphic. Now if you don't remember this in the World Series, one of the Washington Nationals fans was double fist in his Bud Light here. And a baseball was hit, home run, and he's trying to protect this girl right down here. Can you see her? And instead of putting his beard down or dropping them, he just takes one in the gut. And because of that, Bud Light rewarded him handsomely. Now when I and my friends saw this, my fellow meteorologist, we started thinking about this in terms of weather forecasting. So let's do a little analogy here. I am the meteorologist and I sometimes feel it is my obligation to protect you from weather, but in reality it's not. It's to tell you what the heck it's doing. And when we think about weather, let's call the baseball right in here, hitting his ribcage, verification. That's what the weather actually did. Now when I was in Fargo back in December, I got grabbed by a guy, I was leaving the meeting and he followed me out and said, hey, Mr. Snigras, wait up a second. And I said, yeah. He goes, I gotta ask you something. And he was not happy. He goes, why do you use the U.S. models? Are you an American? And I said, what? He goes, you always show us the European model. What's wrong with the U.S. models? And I said, wait a second. The fact that I use a model that's based out of Europe has nothing to do with my pledge of allegiance to this country or my patriotism. And it has everything to do with the fact it's a better model. And I paid dearly for that model. The European Center for Medium Range Forecasting or the ECMWF is right now the premier global model. And on the plane right up here the other day I read a book about why it is. Very interesting confirming a lot of the stuff that we'd studied and understood. That model was put together by the European Union. It had investment from over 20 countries and it is now a private model. Which means it has enormous business investment. And as a result of that business investment, it has been, well, the most highly accurate. In other words, it's the beer in the right hand the closest to what actually happens. Now I have access to it. It costs my company a quarter million dollars a year just to give you the maps. But it's good. And I'm not gonna not show it to you because it's from Europe. The United States, we have a good one too. It's called the GFS. And I was joking a couple weeks ago with a group. I would love to have lunch with Donald Trump if we could limit the conversation to weather and weather only. All right, I mean, I think we could all say that. We would, let's just talk about something that's fun to talk about. Let's just talk about weather. And here's what I would love to do. What have we learned about this man and his presidency? He wants to win constantly. We know that about him. I would love to tell him that the Europeans are kicking our butts. And we need serious investment in the US modeling system. Investment in infrastructure, investment in computing technologies, and investment in the scientists. I do not believe that we should privatize our weather industry. That would be a disaster. If you ask me, that's my opinion only. But better investment from our government is right now, the GFS model is entirely taxpayer funded. It's good. They're great scientists at NOAA. Great, some of the best in the world. But the differences are important to see here. There are other models that we use and I'll show you some of them today. But if you'd like to be entertained, just watch me and some of my friends discuss it on the internet. We talk about the stupidest things about weather that none of you care about. And if you really love weather, I love to pick on my Canadian counterparts here. They have a model called the CMC. And if you love winter weather and like your snow, go look at the Canadian model at any given time of year. Because almost always, it's putting down huge snowfall amounts wherever it wants to. I think it's just the way the Canadians are with their forecasting. So we always say just reaching here for big snow. All right. When you leave today, I actually need this particular site. I'm gonna give you about four main bullet points today. This is the main one I want, the first one was to stick in your brain. With all of the weather technologies that we have been developing and increasing, our forecasting accuracy has improved substantially. We've been keeping track of that accuracy. And this figure shows you from 1981 to 2018, the performance of that European model. And you can just think of the Y axis here as being accuracy. When it comes to day three to day five forecasts, well in central Illinois, some of our local TV stations love to brag about how they have a three degree guarantee in their forecast. I'm here just to tell you that there's no secret sauce to how they do that. It's just the fact that global models right now, especially the European, which they have access to as well, is 97% accurate on a three day forecast for any given location. It's very, very good. In fact, it's good out to five days as well. But have you often noticed that your local TV stations rarely show you weather forecasts beyond five to seven days? And that's because they don't want you to see them being uncertain about weather forecasts. Because as you increase in length of forecasts, the accuracy drops off a lot. Seven day accuracy is about 75%. Ten day accuracy is somewhere here around 50%. And that's important to know and understand. So where do I live in this whole situation? Well, I'll give you a good case in point about this. Couple of weeks ago, Sunday morning, getting up, getting ready to go to church, my wife rolls over and says, Eric, what's the weather gonna be today? You know, we gotta get the kids up and going. You'd think at the Snodgrass household, I would be the local authority on weather forecasts for the day. But I hate to say it, I really don't care at all about the current weather forecast for any given day. Because my research program at Nutrien is trying to improve that day 10, day 20, day 30 forecast. If she were to ask me, what do you think the pattern's gonna be doing in Alaska by the time we get to the end of this month? We could have a great conversation. Instead, I just rolled over and I talked to a little round speaker that's plugged into the wall. Her name's Alexa. She knows what the weather's gonna be today. So ask her, I am more focused on stuff beyond that. And I've been joking since I have been giving talks for the last five years about what my research program is doing. And my research program is attempting to improve the long-range weather forecasting day 10 to about day 45. When I figure this out, I won't be coming to South Dakota to tell you about it. Okay? You can come to me. I will be in the Caribbean. I will have bought an island on the money that I will be making on global energy and grain markets. This is where they tend to move and that is why I'm gonna be here constantly thinking about everything beyond day 10. But just to understand, weather forecasting beyond that time period requires very special skill and I will show you some of the new technologies that we're developing that's improving in that skill set. But if you watch any of my content, especially my long-range analyses I release every Wednesday, you will see how challenging it is to pick apart the pieces of the atmosphere that tell you what's gonna be happening in the long term. Today, half of my talk is about whether that's already happened. I am 100% accurate in hind casting. But in long-range forecasting, you will see what the accuracy looks like because I'm gonna compare it to the groundhog in a few minutes, okay? So why don't we get into that and talk about a weather forecast? This map shows you right now what snowfall has looked like so far this season starting on September 30th to present. The map's got a lot of color to it and you can take a look at your particular area and use that to understand maybe where you currently sit with total accumulated snowfall but I think this map needs better context. So this morning I updated one of my favorite figures, which is this one. What you're now looking at is the comparison to normal. So through February 13th, how many inches have we had in surplus? That goes this direction on the color bar or in deficit there. Now I was in the East Coast twice in the last two weeks and these folks are really missing out on snow. In fact, part of the Ohio River Valley was in Cincinnati just last week and they are complaining that they haven't gotten much snow this year. Out west, the Sierra Nevada Mountains, I'll show you them in a few minutes. This is dire, a dire situation for California. You'll see why in a moment. But look at the North Central Plains. By January 1st of 2020, this corridor right in through here, maybe I'll draw that in white so you can see it right in through there, had already experienced an entire winter and a half's worth of snowfall, halfway through winter. And you've all been knowing and hearing about how tough things have been in this part of the country. I'll come back to that in a moment. I wanna show you what California's dealing with right now. This is an image taken from one of our high resolution satellites last week and what it's looking down on here are the Sierra Nevada Mountains which are right in through here. California leads the nation into production of over 40 different fruits and vegetables and ag tends to follow at times some of the problems that are happening in California. What I just circled there is about 60% of normal on snowfall. What they had a year ago looked like this. Now why bring this up? Well, California has a long standing issue with water and earlier this week, the first time I was in Tampa I was talking to a group called Brookside and while I was there, the guy that presented before me was Stephen Ford who was President Ford's son. Now he and I have talked together before and I reminded him of the first time we met because we met in Nebraska several years ago and I was given a talk similar to this talking about California's long-term water problems. I did not know that he was the next speaker nor do I even know who Stephen Ford was but he's about six foot three. He's a lot bigger than I am and at any given time if he wanted to he could just pound me. So he grabs me by the lapel of my jacket and pulls me out into the hall and I don't know who this man is and he says, great presentation. I'm like, well thank God because I thought you were gonna level me. He goes, I'm Stephen Ford and I shook his hand and he could clearly see that I did not know who Stephen Ford was. He goes, President Ford's son and I'm like, I don't know what to do at this point. So he says, no listen, you gotta change the end of your talk because at that time I was featuring California at the very end. I said, what do you want me to say? He goes, well after the presidency Dad moved us to the San Joaquin Valley in the southern tip of the floor, excuse me, southern part of the central valley of California. He said, when we moved in our property had three wells and each of those wells had an average depth of about 30 feet. So no submersible pumps, plenty of water, plenty of groundwater. He goes, we just put in new wells. The shallowest of our new wells is 800 feet deep. The community average in the southern part of California is 2,000 feet deep. So the long-term water stresses that are in California aren't going anywhere and even though we're far away in the other side of the mountains we gotta watch it very, very carefully is all I'm trying to say. Now while I was at that same conference I had a gentleman in the back of the room jump up when I showed this slide. This was from North Dakota back in December. And I was saying, I can't believe I drove I-29 between Fargo and Mayville and saw stuff like this everywhere. A lot of corn still in the ground in that little corridor. And a lot of that corn had huge drifts of snow in it. And he says, that's, yeah. He goes, let me tell you what happened. The cold snap, I'll show it to you in a few minutes that came through in October. Well we got this flash freeze just barely froze the top soil but then all of a sudden threw in a bunch of snow on top of it. He goes, we just did, it just non-stop snow. Like he goes, you think we need that snow to melt, right? And I said, well, don't you want it to melt? He goes, no, it's holding up the corn. And that's because the snow that came in insulated all the soil beneath it. You don't have a deep freeze right now. And he says, I gotta get all that corn out. He says, I don't think we're gonna be able to do it. He says, by the time everything thaws, by the time all the snow water melts off, it'll be mid-April and into May. And then I gotta get that corn out, get the field ready to plant a new crop because this is all gonna be prevent plant for what he's dealing with up there around where he lives in eastern North Dakota. And I said, I think the problem goes beyond this because since the start of the new year, this map shows you precipitation anomalies which are differences from normal. You can see how dry California has been. You can see why I wanna go back to Florida where it's perfect sunshine down there. But in the midsection of the United States, we have had routinely across the Mississippi and the Missouri watershed between 100 and 500% of normal on precipitation. It has been extremely wet so far this winter. And in my video this morning, if you got a chance to watch it, I put this in there and I want you to see it again. I compared 2019 to 2020. And the map that's over there on the left is our current soil moisture anomalies. And on the right was a year ago. The major differences in the Dakotas, you can see the headwaters of the Missouri and the Mississippi here. So let me draw that in black for you. This area up here. Well, this is in millimeters. So just remember that 100 millimeters is about four inches. So we have the snow, the insulated topsoil and beneath that is the sexist water. And I got asked yesterday, well, what happens if we have a really dry spring? I said it still takes six weeks to get rid of all that water. That's how slow it drains out in the spring. But the whole of what we generally call the Mississippi watershed, which drains about 40% of our land area here, is dealing with excess moisture. And it is quite bad in parts of Illinois in an Iowa where I was yesterday, or two days ago, sorry. And I was down here in Tennessee and Kentucky. You don't want to see what things look like there. This part of text about the only place has been dry where we grow a lot of corn and soybeans right now. California also been dealing with dry, as you can see out there on the western side of the United States. But just to show you a year ago, much of the excess water was further down the watershed. So that's a major difference I do want you to take in here. Where is their drought? Few areas. I want you in the Dakotas to watch this map evolve with me very carefully as we move through the month of May. What I want you to watch is to see if the drought comes out of the four corner states and starts to hit parts of South Dakota, excuse me, not South Dakota, but Nebraska, this part of Kansas and Oklahoma, or if the drought that is sitting here in southern Texas moves up into Oklahoma and Arkansas. If it expands this way or this way, what I begin to get concerned about for summer is if we put a bunch of dry air sitting right in this area, the jet stream tends to do this. And if it runs over a ridge here, we tend to have hotter, drier summers. Now, at this point, nobody worries about it. You worry about it. If I'm talking about it, mid-May. That's it, okay? No worry. I'll keep you updated. That's one thing I am gonna be keeping a close eye because droughts like we had in 2011 to 2012, 88, 80, they all started off with drought somewhere to our south or somewhere to our south and west. So let's just keep an eye on this together as we progress through this growing season. I put this map in my presentation this morning too. If I could give you bullet point number two to think about for the rest of my talk, and honestly, if you wanna become an amateur meteorologist, just never forget this. You're looking down on the North Pole here, always keep an eye on Alaska. The changes in Alaska often happen first. They are the bellwether for changes in weather that we have across the rest of North America. Right now, for the last 45 days, we've seen the coldest air in the Northern Hemisphere sitting over parts of Greenland and Alaska. It's been very warm in Russia, including the Russian wheat belt, which runs right in through here in Europe. We have had surrounding the Hudson Bay very warm conditions, and this of course comes down at the eastern half of the country. When cold air has come out of Alaska, kinda takes this trajectory right straight through the Dakotas, and that's exactly what we've seen recently. Our Great Lakes, I put this in the video this morning right now, are only 20% ice covered. Normally by this time of year, we're talking about somewhere between 50 and 60%. And that warmth has kept those lakes completely ice free in some sections that I've not ever seen ice free. This is how warm this winter has been so far. The problem is how we got into it. Now this is a fun graph for South Dakota. What you're looking at here is going all the way back to August 17th, up to two days ago, so this updates every two days, okay? What you've got here is our mean temperature in a dash line where we were warmer than average shows up in red and where we were cooler than average shows up in blue. Basically, we had our winter back in October and early November. The cold snaps that came through froze some corn in those fields at 30% moisture, and it's a disaster because of how cold things were. What have we seen throughout the heart of our winter? Well, we spent pretty much from Christmas, little bit few days before Christmas, all the beginning of January, quite warm. Then we had a cold snap here, and then went right back over to warm again. What you see right now is this is gonna dive way down here again for about a day because by the end of this weekend, we're already gonna warm back up after this cold snap has gone through. This is a very, excuse me, unique winter. Like I said, when we've had cold air come through, let me show you this outbreak that happened right here. It's come out of Alaska and snuck through the Canadian prairies right into the north center part of the United States. And when this particular event happened, this guy from Calgary, his name is Kyle, gave me a great video to show. He decided to hang up his clothes at minus 40 degrees. And of course, they froze solid here. And I don't know about you, but when I was a kid, we didn't do this, right? We just filled cups with hot water and tossed them up to see it kind of explode. But they decided to play frisbee and everything with us. And you know, I was telling you about what was going on down in Florida. You can see here, when they got down those wind chills between 35 and 40, I'm sure you heard about this on the news, but all the iguanas got really cold. And they, of course, being a cold-blooded reptile, they get really sluggish and they fall out of trees. Now, I've been on the road too much to watch any news, but I hope some news station covered the story from about five years ago when this happened about five years ago. And one guy went out and collected a bunch of these iguanas, which are just laying almost dormant. They're just slow down, they're fine, but they're just chilling out for a while, literally. And he put them in his car, about a hundred of them. And the car has a natural greenhouse effect and it just warmed them all up. And I don't know what happened after that. I don't know if he was driving or anything, but that would have been a disaster. So we've had these cold air intrusions. This is what our most recent one looks like. I just want to show you this again, because our source of cold air is going to be Alaska for the foreseeable future. This slid right down through the prairies and got us again. And that cold air, as it came through, brought it with it just a little bit of snow. The Blizzard warnings that we had yesterday were not on excessive snowfall amounts. If you're not clear on what the Blizzard criteria is, National Weather Service says you just gotta have four things. You just need to have snow. It doesn't even need to be falling, but there must be snow. 35 mile an hour sustained winds, visibility below a quarter of a mile. All of those three things have to last for at least three hours before they issue the Blizzard warning. What we had yesterday on that small snowfall amount from the previous 24 hours was a ground blizzard. And there were several videos. This one came out from the North Dakota Highway Patrol where they closed down parts of I-29. Ground blizzards like this, what's amazing is you go up about 40 feet, you're in crystal clear blue sky. But down here near the surface, you almost can't see anything. And what I showed in my video this morning was this incredible loop from satellite yesterday. So this is using our high resolution geostationary satellites. And what I want you to focus in on is right here. The streaks you see there as the sun was setting last night, watch it again right there, that was our ability to actually see the snow blowing from 36,000 kilometers away from Earth's surface. Amazing what this technology can do for us now. That ground blizzard was a tough one. And I was worried I wasn't gonna get to fly in, but thankfully in the Dakotas, your pilots know how to handle this stuff. And we landed just fine and I got to get here today. So I was quite happy about that. Here's the cold snap we saw. This is valid about a couple of hours ago just because I was finishing up my presentation. And it is very temporary as that cold air has come through. By the way, stretching from North to South, we have seen a temperature change in part of this state. Look right in through here. The 24 hour temperature change early this morning to early yesterday morning was 50 degrees. A 50 degree swing in temperature. And there's no place on Earth like the Northern Plains to experience stuff like this. So being a weather junkie, I loved it. It was fantastic. This is what things are gonna look like on Sunday. So when I tell you it's temporary, by Sunday our temperature anomaly, so this is difference from normal, we will be back in temperatures that range between zero and 10 degrees above our average. So the cold shot we got is not lasting very long at all. If you've been missing snow, let me take you to Newfoundland. They had a good snowfall event this year. This guy opens his garage door to seven feet drifts. And he just kind of sit here and go like, what are you gonna do, right? You're gonna blow that in the garage before it goes out. So by the way, have you often heard that we often talk about liquid to snow ratios where from like one inch of rain you can get 10 inches of snow. You ever heard that before? Okay, this snow, because it was so cold, was 40 to one. So you get 40 inches of snow out of one inch of liquid. And by the way, your ratios on the snow that just came in, the light dusting really that we got, it was about 30 to one. That's how cold it was. That's why it's blowing so easily. By the way, his neighbor thought he could carve his way out to his truck. And my whole questioning about this video is, yeah, it's fantastic. You spent three hours digging your way out to your truck. But what's next? You're not going for a ride because the roadway is completely covered in snow as well but at least they made a valiant effort. Now the jet stream pattern that got us into this stretched across the North Atlantic over the last few days. And I'm sure the news covered this in good detail. But right here in the North Atlantic, this pocket of wind earlier this week added a 250 mile an hour tailwind to any flight to Europe. 250 miles an hour. But it made landing quite tricky. And this is a video I showed earlier this week. I hope you all got to see this. I think they call this crabbing where the aircraft come in with such a crazy angle here. I think about 25 to 30 degrees. I've been on some crazy flights. I've been on the Hurricane Hunter. I've done some fun stuff. I don't ever want to do this. Like that would be a bit chaotic. Anyways, let's get on from there and see what we've got to do with now. Normally this time of year, planters are rolling in the southern part of the United States. We're getting planning with our soybeans and corn. The stuff that goes in first goes out the port first. Normally that would have already been rolling. But this map shows you over the last two weeks how much rainfall parts of the mid-south and the south have seen. I had to make an adjustment on my color bar. Usually I just let it go up to 10 inches. That's a lot of rain in a two week time period. I adjusted it up to 24 inches because parts of Tennessee, Kentucky, Northern Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia have had over 15 inches of rainfall. And they're not even close to being done. So this is an interesting part to our market story. Remember, this is the corn and soybeans that's grown down here. Yeah, they grow it down there. That typically gets to port first and goes out first. They're already putting this and harvesting it by July. They're way delayed because of that map right there. And over the next 10 days, that same location is forecast to be quite wet. And that's what you see right down here. This is a map of precipitation anomalies. In addition to normal, they're expecting an extra half inch to two inches of rainfall. And they're not happy about this at all. But you can also see this little corridor right in through here shows up with some green as well. We have a couple of systems that are coming through that are looking to make things quite snowy around here as well. Let me show you them very quickly. This is from the high resolution European model. And what I want you to watch with me here, let's pause it right about there, is we got this high pressure system that's going through. But when it slides off the East Coast, it just funnels moisture right back into the midsection of the country. And as it does so, by the way, your weekend right here, this is Saturday morning. It's gonna be extremely windy because of that return moisture coming in. And this is the system we're dealing with. This is Monday afternoon and evening, getting into Tuesday morning right in through here. And as this next system comes through, we not only see very tight spacing in the isobars that tells us how strong the pressure gradient is, that's a direct correlation to wind speed, but right now the models are putting down quite a bit of snow over us as well. So we have another system we're dealing with next week. Again, this is on Monday night into Tuesday morning timeframe. And that system slides on through and just like the last time, we were expecting another big high pressure cell sitting right here to come in and cool things off again. But all these shots of colder air are relatively brief. Now from there, let me show you how much snow we're anticipating. This is from the European model. Now when you look at this, I need everybody's attention. Look at me, don't look at the screen. This is just one model simulation for the snowfall next week. And all that you should be looking at it for is to see where the model's trying to put in the heaviest corridor of snow, not the amount. Because right now the latest model runs going a little bonkers with snowfall. We're predicting across parts of the eastern half of the state maybe upwards of 10 inches of snow right in through this corridor here. But it's just one model run. You see the modern technological advances in weather forecasting is that we can actually run the same model 50 times and average them. And the probability of us at least getting three inches out of this next system gets here to be above about 30 to 40%. The fact of the matter is, it's Thursday. This storm system's coming in at least five to six days from now. We need to watch the trend in the forecast all of this rest of this week and the next weekend to see if we continue to see high snowfall amounts here. So my story is, watch it. It could be impactful mid-week next week. It doesn't matter if we don't get much snow, the winds are gonna be strong with this one as well and another big shot at colder air coming in behind it. So keep that in mind for this system that's coming in next week. Now here is a continuation of lesson number two. Right now, sitting over the next 10 days, so this gets us all the way to like February 23rd, our coldest air on the planet is here and here, over Alaska and over Greenland. And the jet stream is doing this, all right? And because of that, any systems we're gonna be getting are gonna come around this ridge in the Gulf of Alaska and out of the Northwest and then dig and shoot right up like this. And they're gonna come right through the central plains and more than likely you're gonna be on the northern side of them and on the colder side of them and getting snow. But the real cold air is not over the North Central Plains. It's over Alaska and Greenland. And that's why I'm telling you that any shot we have at some cooler weather is brief. So you can see it here. Big ridge off of California, keeping California dry. The jet stream goes right around this side of it and comes diving down like that, meets up with a subtropical branch here and they take on off toward the north and east. That's the GFS on the left. The European is over here on the right. Same thing, ridge in place, California's dry. Jet stream comes over, down and back up. And it meets up with the subtropical branch. Now you're looking at this going, well, it's showing me dry. But remember, when you're on the cold side of these low pressure systems and you're getting snow, it will be dry. But it's because you don't need as much water to make snow. So we're gonna be in the main snow corridor for the next couple of systems that come through here. And this looks all the way out to the 28th of February. Like I said, any chance that cold air comes out of Alaska. So today through the next five days, our cold shot came through here. When we look into next week, we're starting to see the rebounding of some colder air that comes into the deeper trough out west and any shots that stink through the prairies will come through just like this again. But there'll be brief, which is why on the whole, we see warmer than average conditions in through here. And that's because the upper level winds are coming in like that, as we showed you. When they go over the mountains and descend the other side, they warm and dry things out and they also warm things up, okay? But all the way out here and beyond this, and this is where we get a little nerdy today, I wanna know, is that going anywhere? Because through the next 15 days, the models have been very clear about keeping Alaska cold. And if it happens and stays that way, then our chances of having a real return toward winter minimize. But I did some research earlier this week and I looked at what happens when we have very cold February's in Alaska. What do we get in March? And in about half of those cold February's for Alaska, they unlock their cold in this direction for March. And nobody in here wants to hear that. Remember that all I'm doing is reporting the weather to you, I don't create it. If I could create it, we'd have a much different discussion today, all right? I want all eyes on Alaska as we move through the next 15 to 20 days. So let's understand how this all works together. If we see this happening, see that right there? That's a trough that moved off of Greenland and over toward Europe. If this trough that was over Alaska shoves back here to the Bering Sea, we go really active on the East Coast and colder and drier in the North Central Plains. Now this is a forecast getting out to the beginning of March. Watch it carefully. I have to watch it too. Very low confidence. We're 15 to 20 days out in the forecast. Let's take that and start to piece it all together. Now this gets kind of fun. This is the world in which I live, all right? That's the port of Amsterdam. I do not know how there are not more shipwrecks here. How in the world does all of it stay coordinated? This is the same problem that I deal with in the atmosphere. At any given time, there are things happening half a world away that could be impacting the flow of our stream, the jet stream. And I wanna talk with you about the techniques I'm developing that are getting us better at this and then we'll talk about spring in South America and we'll finish this up. So my goal in weather forecasting, my main focus is every single county you see here with a circle in it. Data from 2018, what you're seeing here is the size of corn production per county represented in a circle. I need to know what weather events are impacting this. To do that, I have to remove myself from the forecast. I have a problem. I care about all of you in this room and I don't wanna screw up a forecast or mess with your livelihoods. And as a result, I have problems at times with confirmation bias. I want to see better weather behavior so that it favors your production. To take myself out of the forecast and improve my long-range predictability, I am using the algorithms that Netflix uses to predict the next movie you wanna watch. Have you noticed that when you go watch something on a Netflix, they make a recommendation about what to watch next? And how often are they right? It was amazing. I had a friend who confessed to losing an entire month of her life to our Netflix subscription because it kept recommending things and she kept binge watching. And after gaining a few pounds and ruining her couch, she finally plucked herself off and is back to her normal life again. But that's what Netflix does. It segments us, it understands our behaviors and changes everything. In fact, two weeks ago I was wrenching in the garage with my buddy Todd. We're having this conversation about his truck which then all of a sudden turned to a conversation about fondant. Do you know what this is? I did not know. You basically, I think, make cakes with it. Now here's my buddy Todd, who's covered head to toe in Greece, talking to me about cake making because he's obsessed with the show that Netflix recommended to him called The Great British Baking Show. And he's convinced that one of the characters named Mary Berry is having an affair with another character called Hollywood. And what was really sad about this was that I have plans with my wife next week to watch it because I'm now quite convinced that I need to understand what's going on with fondant and Mary Berry. Think about what Amazon does to you. You go buy something on Amazon and immediately with that one click it's shipped to your door and it says people who bought this also bought that. And you just keep clicking away and as long as you can pay the credit card bill everything is fine. How they do this, the techniques that they use are being used right now in the atmosphere because here's my problem. Segmenting out all of the things that change the weather patterns is challenging. At any given time this is just a small sampling of them. I don't know which pieces of the atmosphere ultimately determine what happens around here but this software does. And I drew those arrows right out of my hometown of Champaign, Illinois. Anything beyond day 10 in the forecast I rely on machine learning to help me identify the main components. And I'm still about a year and a half away from fully implementing these software solutions. Well it took Netflix a decade and Amazon 15 years to figure it out and even though they gave away their algorithms coding them is very challenging. But when I figure this out I'll share it with you because I think it'll be groundbreaking in our forecasts. So here's the manual version of this. These are my ships in the port of Amsterdam. At any given time any one of these circulations can mess with you. And this is the one this year that hasn't. I'm gonna take you up 10 miles in the atmosphere to the stratospheric polar vortex. It's looked like that for much of the month of January and early February on the left. The more that looks like a donut, the more it looks like a nice tightly spinning circulation, the more the really cold air stays right in the middle of it over the Arctic. And if it's like looking like that which it's gonna look like that I think through the rest of winter the chances of us getting truly Arctic air that sits here for a month is very limited. A year ago on the right you have the polar vortex fully disrupted. It's broken into two branches, one that's sitting over the Hudson Bay another one that's sitting over parts of Europe and Russia. And the split in that polar vortex did this to our temperatures. That map shows you back on January 31st, 2019 a snapshot at 7 a.m. temperatures. Now when I make weather maps I usually find it that it's rare that we'll get down to minus 40 as an actual temperature. Wind chills go below that but as an actual temperature. Well I had to readjust my color bar once again because Minnesota went off the chart. Eastern half of North and South Dakota were seeing temperatures in the minus 30 to minus 40 range. We smashed an all time record in Illinois at minus 38. A fully disrupted polar vortex. Will you ask me what got 2019 going making it the wettest and most active spring on record for this part of the world? That. So let me give you some good news. If that's what triggered last year's activity this is the polar vortex through the next 10 days. Not disrupted. Spinning tightly over the Arctic. Which means it's not amplifying our weather systems. That is some good news for spring. And as a result it's gonna try to keep all the really cold air north, not north but above the zero line here on this index. If it was gonna get super cold and stay cold you see it way down here like this. So the polar vortex is about done as being a major factor for what can control our weather moving forward. You see we come back to Alaska. Our coldest February is in March. Pull in the heat into Alaska or into Greenland. The heat that or the coldness was there gets pushed right in the north central plains. And right now if we keep the cold over Alaska we're gonna finish February on a warmer than average note. And that's what we're seeing in this forecast. Keep an eye on Alaska. You've seen this map already and this is the result of it. Any cold air intrusions are brief and they come in just like that. So from there let's talk about some other things that give you some good news for spring and then we'll look at the actual spring forecast. This is probably one of my most important maps of the day or figures of the day. And here's what it is. Earth is rotating and it's round. I know that there are some NBA superstars that some team don't wanna tell us that the earth is flat. I don't know why. You know what Kyrie Irving great basketball player love the guy right? Stick to basketball my friend. You're very good at that. I don't need to hear you expound on weather systems in the earth's roundness. I have two friends that are astronauts. They've confirmed that the earth is in fact round. All right. So the earth spinning really really rapidly. I'm completely disoriented but I'm gonna guess that way is east. Is that right? Darn it. That way is east. If the earth stopped rotating we would all know it for a moment because we'd smash into that wall at about 820 miles an hour. We're moving quickly by the way thinking about this. Do you all remember the movie Superman? The first one with the original Superman guy. What was his name? Shoot. Christopher Reeves. You remember at the very end of it how he's gonna turn back time to save us by flying the other way around earth getting it to rotate? That would not do anything with time but instead destroy and kill all of us. So that's not how we would do this. Anyways, the earth is rotating and let me get back to the meteorology. All right. We measure always if the atmosphere which is sitting on top of this rotating planet has a net velocity that is greater than the rotation of earth or less. Here is what you need to know. Throughout the month of January the net speed of the atmosphere has really reached a peak and has since come back down. Now what does that mean? When it did this the jet stream flattens out and it screams. It's moving fast. The flatter the jet stream the more frequent low pressure systems are that's why the south is soaked but the less of a change you have in getting really cold air to come out of the north. We've seen now the global angular momentum calm back down. What's the difference? A year ago right now I had just witnessed one of the biggest disruptions of the polar vortex one. That set off the next six weeks of active weather. This year polar vortex is strong. A year ago right now the global atmospheric angular momentum was very low and it was cranking up through March setting us off on an extremely wet spring. These two major factors are not pointing toward a wet spring for us. Much closer to normal. The problem is even a normal spring with the excess of moisture that's in the soil will cause problems. So we're set up for issues regardless of how this forecast moves forward. Right now there is no influence from El Nino or La Nina because we don't have one. These are global ocean temperatures inside the Ovala distru there. If we had warmer than normal conditions there we'd call it El Nino. If we had colder we'd call it La Nina. This year we're calling it La Nada because it's neither El Nino, La Nina's not doing anything. And so there's one other factor I'm gonna watch for you, okay? And it's this factor right here. If you've been watching my weather videos you know that I go on and on about this thing called the MJO. Madden and Julian, two research scientists that figured out that somewhere between Africa and the center Pacific there's a huge cluster of thunderstorms and they move. They just slide back and forth over this area. So they decided to label it phases one through eight. Wherever they are we can correlate where their position is with our weather. And we've been watching it through this winter. And this is what I want you to know. When we're thinking about phases one through eight we make a phase diagram. Can you see them labeled? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. All right, here's what you need to remember. If the MJO is out here in phases four, five and six over here we are gonna be seeing much warmer weather in this part of the country and much colder weather tucked away into Alaska. We've spent much of winter as seen on the phase diagram there with that setup. Now if the MJO pops out over here in the phases seven, eight, one and two you know that Alaska then warms up in the middle part of the country cools off. The MJO is seen in all these squiggly lines. It's currently sitting right here and it's forecast to somehow come over to this side. But it's gonna take another 15 to 20 days for that to happen. This is why I have some concern about March going over to cooler and drier at this point but it's not a slam dunk in the forecast. We gotta watch this carefully. Putting it all together, this is what our long range models think is gonna happen. They think that any cold air that's gonna come out of Alaska is gonna do this and be temporary. They're keeping the jet stream strong out of the south. Sorry, let's draw that in black. Strong out of the south like this keeping this half of the country relatively warm. That's also where they're forecasting the most active winter storms. We being on the boundary of this we'll be mostly in the snow regime which is normal for us this time of year but right now it's calling for a little bit drier conditions through the next month and a half. From there, let's talk briefly about South America and we finish this up, okay? South America, 123 million metric tons of beans is what they're currently expecting. That is the largest crop by far. South America's advantage over North America is this curve on the bottom area. The slope of that line is to the tune of 600,000 hectares of new land every year. This year they added one million new acres into production. Their yield curve is similar to ours on soybeans, ours is just higher than what you see here but because of the exponential increase in land their production numbers are exponential as well and there's no reason for this to slow down anytime soon. I would like to clear the air on something important about Brazil's increases in acreage. We heard in the news media that they're just rapidly burning down the rainforest. Please understand that the Brazilian farmers understand the vitality of that Amazon is critical to their monsoon. And while they are deforesting some parts of the southern edge of it, these are some fires from earlier this year. Most of the fire activity you heard about in the news back in August and September was pasture land farther to the south. Their big acreage increases is not coming from eating the Amazon. It's the conversion of pasture land for cattle over to production land for corn and soybeans and they've been doing that since the 80s. They know not to ruin that rainforest. Yet still economic pressures are forcing them to expand north. But most of the increases from farther south. This summer I met with two groups of Brazilian farmers in total I think I talked about 60 different Brazilian growers. By the way, one of those guys, he partly owned and managed half a million hectares of land and I couldn't fathom the amount of equipment that he has to maintain to do farming where he does farming. He was invited to a party in the middle of their winter that the Brazilian government threw. I forgot the name of the party. But there were 900 of the country's largest growers and it was estimated that in that room with that part of the government and those growers that 42% of Brazil's GDP was there. So when we think about ag in Brazil, it is huge and it is expanding. But they have problems we don't have here in North Dakota. This video came out earlier this year in our December. This would of course been the part of their summer where a guy's driving along one of his service roads here honking the horn. And as you can see in the video, they had some trouble with some wild hogs. Now the guy who took the video estimated that there was a thousand of them in the field. And I don't know what kind of weapon you need to take care of this problem. But that would be a pretty interesting hog roast if it's all said and done. So let's take this and understand some Brazilian geography very quickly. When you think about Brazil's most productive regions, go right to Madagroça, which is here. Follow it south, that's our most productive area. In Argentina, draw a triangle between Santa Fe, Cordoba and Buenos Aires. And right in the middle there is where you have your most productive ground. So with that as the background context, take a look at this. As of yesterday, or two days ago, we're looking here at how good things look from space. You cannot use space-based remote sensing to detect how good a crop is in Brazil. You can use it in Argentina, but not Brazil. The problem is every day in the afternoon in Brazil, it storms. There's lots of clouds you can't see through the crop. But down here in Argentina, the most productive ground is looking very good. The surrounding areas, not so much. A year ago, the whole of it was looking good. Where there are problems in Brazil is Brazil's southern growing areas, specifically Rio Grande do Sul and Paraná. Now as we think forward about South America, they are rapidly harvesting a crop in Madagroça, which is inside that box. Excuse me. They're about 12% behind what they were a year ago at this time harvesting soybeans. They're pushing up on kind of a date of no return, where if they don't get a sofrina crop in, they will not be nearly as large. But right now, they are anticipating a huge sofrina corn crop because the price, on average, through the country of Brazil is about $5 a bushel for corn. They have very low domestic supply, their exports demand is very high, and the price is right to go after huge acreage on corn and cotton. But there have been some problems, but nothing right now to disrupt the markets in a way that would be favorable to the United States. Do I have any Brazilian growers in the audience? Okay, now I'm just saying this, but I would never say this to my Brazilian friends. Every one of you right now needs this spot to get super wet. It'd be like you trying to harvest soybeans in October and it doesn't stop raining. And then after that, we need to not rain again until next year. And the problem is I don't foresee either of those two things happening. I think the Brazil right now is on pace to have a huge soybean crop and we'll likely have a big corn crop as well. Argentina, no major struggles at this point to report to you. And every morning I have a conversation at 3 a.m. with a guy in Switzerland who wants me to tell him what's going on in Argentina and reports back. He said their most productive fields, on average, are doing just fine right now. Well, that's not the news you wanna hear about South America, it is the news. So keep an eye on it. Very quickly, Australia. On the southeastern side, the fires and the smoke that you see here, right now have burned six times the acreage that the fires in 2018 in California burned. And as that heat came through, drying everything out, some of the smoke from those fires spread 7,000 kilometers across the South Pacific, was measured in Chile and Argentina. These fires are expansive and I've never seen a number like this. Back on December the 18th, the whole of the continent of Australia measured a national average of 107 degrees. Now just from perspective, the land area that you see here in Australia equals the size of the lower 48. Could you imagine the whole of the lower 48 averaging 107 degrees? They had their hottest year on record and their driest, which is bucks a longer term upward trend and precipitation for Australia. But since then, it has been almost nonstop thunderstorm activity here. This is what some of the storms looked like a couple of weeks ago, dropping some sizable hail. Trust me, I know that you in South Dakota know hail. You've had much bigger hail than this, but when it comes through, you know the destruction that it does. And this guy got a video in his tree grove here. We had a net over the top of it that caught a bunch of the hail and he had to burst it to let it through. Since then, they've also had massive dust storms. Now the meteorological name of these dust storms is Habub. And my seven-year-old son think that's the best possible name for any weather system in the world. These Habubes or dust storms, as they race through, can often produce, we're still giggling about this at home, by the way, can still produce winds here that exceed 60 to 100 miles an hour. And I want to show you how they form. This is amazing. We have massive thunderstorms that erupt, often very high-based, that put down precipitation that evaporates when it's the ground, we call it Virga. But the downdraft still slams into the ground. It's dry though. And when it hits the ground, it produces outflow. This is a video from Memphis, Tennessee last year where some outflow was really well seen on radar. You see the ring stretching out from the middle of those storms? That's the downdraft, the outflow radiating out from the storm. And as it does that, if it's dry, it can pick up all that dust. So what you can't see from the video I just showed you is that sitting on top of it is a storm. And so that is how these particular features work. And they can spread dust a long way. Since then, the burn-scarred area over here has received an enormous amount of rainfall. And the other side of the country, so if you just need to know where they grow a lot of stuff in Australia, it's the circle over there and it's right down here as well. They just had a big typhoon sweep through here, not a typhoon, excuse me, a cyclone. It looked like that. Now you're looking at that going, wait a second, it looks like it's spinning in the opposite direction of ours, right? Remember we talked about hurricanes at the beginning? They do in the Southern Hemisphere. And I was gonna tell you all something, this is saved for another lecture. Yes, big low pressure systems spin in the opposite direction in the Southern Hemisphere versus the Northern. It has nothing to do with toilets, okay? Just wanna clear that up. But we can talk about that another time. As it came through, I got this great video from this Australian who's got a new metric I think we could start using to measure wind speed. We're gonna, you know, we have wind socks, we could call this the beard measurement. He stepped down to 100 mile an hour wind and that's enough to split the old beard there. So I think that's a pretty good measurement. All right, let's get toward the end of this and talk spring. So the groundhog came out, of course, a couple of weeks ago and gave us his prognosis of what we expect to happen. I have just two things I wanna tell you about the groundhog. First, I have several more degrees than this animal and I noticed you didn't invite him to come speak today. Secondly, we need to write a number on top of this. The number's 38. That is the groundhog's historical accuracy with forecasting a spring, 38%. Now we laugh, but sit tight, I got something to tell you about this. So let's talk spring. We run seven separate global models in the United States that predict spring weather. Actually, they predict weather out nine months, they run once a month, okay? This is the projection from the National Multimodal Ensemble for March through May. And as you look at this, we see that these models do not want to let go of persistence. What does that mean? Keep the ridge here, run the jet stream over the top of it, hence wetter conditions there. Bring the subtropical branch underneath it, crank up wet here. They want to really establish a big block in the flow off of the West Coast of the United States for March, April, and May. That would give us a very snowy and very wet end to our winter and a very wet start. Now, before you get angry and start throwing stuff at me, let me finish the story. This is the best global model we have, the European model. It has got this whole section of the country showing up wet. It has a little different configuration in the Gulf of Alaska, but still it is hinting at a wetter spring, especially as you get east of the Mississippi River. It has no strong temperature bias either way. Now, we made fun of the groundhog a little while ago, time to make fun of the global models. You want to know what their historical accuracy rate is? This is why I told you earlier that the realm in which we live in weather forecasting is out 10 days. We can make predictions from day 10 to as far as we want, and I'm working hard on that 10 to 45 day forecast. But nobody, I promise you, nobody knows what spring and summer's gonna do right now. No one. We had hints a year ago. You go back and, while my videos are archived, you can watch them. In February, I said to somebody, I said, hey, this pull of vortex disruption plus these wind speeds, if this doesn't stop, if it doesn't stop, we're gonna have a wet spring. I didn't say historic crop ending spring because none of us could see that far out. Don't forget that this is merely a projection. This could all fall apart in March. You remember 2018? Remember how cold April was in 2018? What happened May 2018? The biggest possible flip from the coldest to the warmest in April to May we've ever seen, we planted like mad. That's what a non-linear chaotic system does. So these are simply projections and things we're watching. But I know the heart felt hurt that we had from last year. I'm gonna do a quick reliving of 2019. Ready? This is every day from April 1st through the end of the growing season, total accumulated precipitation per day. While it is not the wettest year on record, it does hold the record for the most frequent precipitation events across the heart of this country. Try to find yourself a planting window or a harvesting window in this animation. When we think about it in terms of numbers, it's the second wettest. January to December last year, second wettest, except for up here, 125 out of 125. We had the wettest year on record for parts of the headwaters of the Mississippi and the Missouri getting over toward the Great Lakes States in the Ohio River Valley. By state, North Dakota had its wettest year on record, 125th out of 125 so did South Dakota in getting over into Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan. And by region, this is what things look like. Don't shoot the messenger. Our Mississippi River and all of its tributaries flooded like mad. And I went down to St. Louis in June, snapped this picture in front of the arch. If you've never been to the arch, go see it. There's a bunch of steps that lead up to it. Had the water gone up, three more steps right here would have broken the records at 1993. Moving forward, this is what our precipitation anomalies look like from May 5th, excuse me, April 15th through June 30th. There were some sections to your south down here that averaged over that 45, excuse me, 65 days, or however many days that is, that time period averaged an additional foot and a half of rainfall. And I wanna show you a couple of pictures from my part of the world. This is in Indiana. The picture on the left was taken May, excuse me, June 18th, 2018. The picture on the right was June 18th, 2019. And I got two kids which I love dearly and I thought I'd throw in a picture of my son, Graham. He's seven, he is a clone of me almost exactly. I look the same way. We're driving along in my hometown of Mahomet, Illinois, it's in eastern Illinois. And while we were driving there, I slam on the brakes in the truck and I'm like, Graham, get out, go stand over there by that corn. He's like, why, dad? I'm like, just do it now. He gets out of the truck and he stands there and I force him to smile. He says, why do we do that? And I said, son, you're four feet tall, not nine feet tall. And the corn is up to your waist on July the 9th. He says, what's the big deal? And I said, it should be twice your height pollinating. I should be out doing field samples right now and instead we're waiting for the crop to come up. I don't ever want to forget 2019. This is a map you're all intimately familiar with. That's our prevented plant acres, 20 million of which. We were having a discussion earlier. I would have wondered what would have happened with our prevent plant acres had we not kind of had a bit of a government intervening here telling us to get something in the ground. It would have been a great year to study that effect. But when you put that together with the flood insurance program, $5.3 billion spent on flood insurance and you can see the payouts by state, South Dakota leading the way with no trouble at all. So I understand the pain of 2019. Let's put it into context though. Corn planting progress. The black line you see animating here represents the planting progress of 2019. It's the new benchmark against which we're gonna measure everything. And I can make a couple of statements about that and it comes back to markets. I'm not a market expert, but I was blown away by this being all we got out of the problems of 2019. There's 12, and what I've discovered about the way the markets behave between the way that they behave and the way we behave is this. Earlier this year there was a fight that broke out between the Cincinnati Reds and the Pirates. And all the news crews, of course, videotaping this. And one of them got a great snapshot of a police officer right there. And in my opinion, the police officer is the markets when we're fighting about how bad things are. Sometimes they just don't care what we have to say about how rough things are for us. So if I could make this statement, and I would be more than happy to hear a rebuttal or to hear what else you wanna say, this is what I would think. If weather's gonna drive the markets, if Brazil and Argentina come out with what we expect them to come out with, this will be limiting on the ability for us to have a big spring rally. What I think will give us a spring rally is this top bullet point right here. If we don't plant at the pace that matches the five-year average, if we're slower than that this year, I think the markets will remember 2019 in great detail. If we go past that pace, I think the markets will forget 2019 and spring like it ever happened. Now that's just my weather perspective on this. I am not a market expert, that's what I would think. We know there's almost always a spring rally. I'm trying to figure out things that can make it better or worse for us. After spring is done, all attention's gonna be put on the Gulf of Alaska to the Caribbean, or it's not to the Caribbean, excuse me, but to the Central Pacific. If there are any pre-season indicators that we could have drought in summer, it's gonna start here. Historically, cold water in that area leads to excessive heat in the midsection of the country. Why? The trough dips over Alaska and dips here over parts of Greenland. And therefore it runs north there and gets us hot and dry. What's going on right now? Well, we're watching because the current forecast for June, July and August are trying to cool things off. This is not a forecast for a La Nina summer, but we're watching this area. If you hear me start talking about the colder water expanding into this region, then that increases the probability that we could have a hotter and drier summer. Right now, there's no indication that it's going to do that. So to finish this up, I wanna talk to you about trends, a minute or two on it. I created a figure that looks at the difference between two 20 year time periods, or 19 year time periods. Over the last 40 years, draw a line on the continental divide. West has been getting drier systematically and the east has been getting wetter systematically. Put it into numbers, take a look at this. Since 1981, South Dakota has tripled the number of rainfall events per 24 hours that give you two inches of rain per more across the state. I think everybody in this room has felt this and has observed this. When we're getting rain, it's coming in bigger helpings. The data support, the anecdotes which you've all shared with me, a tripling in the frequency of two inch rainfall events. For the state of South Dakota, over our growing season, which I call April, October, over the last 70 years, we have increased total precipitation on average. Again, this is an average of four inches. We do still have drier time periods. We can still have drought, but on average, four inches. This gets much worse the farther south and east you go. Over my state of Illinois, our problems are huge when it comes to spring rains. Every field in my state is going after pattern tiling that doesn't already have it. Because for the rest of the Corn Belt, excuse me, we've added on average 5.5 inches of rainfall to our growing season. The east is getting wetter and the west is getting drier and this long-term systematic bias cannot be ignored. It is statistically significant. We've applied the statistical test to understand if this trend is for real. So when I think about all of this, I think about water management. And the thing that I want to stress to you about water management and why I was so happy to get invited to this conference, I speak at about 120 events a year and there are very few of them that I look forward to going to. I was gonna be genuinely upset if I didn't make it up here yesterday from Tampa and had to go home because conferences like this are critical to our future success given the changes that we've seen as of late. Specifically, soil health management. When I come up here and hear about the tillage practices that are in place in the Dakotas, I hate to say it and I love my friends from Illinois and Iowa, the I States. But you have been forced, given the ground you have, to be so much more innovative in the way that you take care and protect your soil. And as a result, where's the corn belt expanding here? And because of it, your yields are increasing. The way you take care of the ground is improving and you are modeling the behavior that the rest of us need to model in the corn belt. And I'm forever impressed by it. Now I can talk with you a lot about soil water management techniques. Specifically, I'm fascinated by the idea of these things called saturated buffers. I saw one go in earlier this year and it was amazing to see the way that we were able to take care of water in parts of Illinois with one of these things. But the tillage practices in place here, I wish were adopted by the rest of the country. And I'm excited to see what you all are doing. So anytime I get invited to a conference where the main topic is soil health, I am a solid yes. I wanna go there and I wanna hear what's going on. So well done. But I wanna talk to you about changing practices. And when I do that, I wanna talk to you one last story about this young man here. His name is Ferdinand and high school in the 1960s, he stood seven feet two, weight 200 pounds. We call that a bean pole, but he was really good at basketball. That is a regular sized basketball in his hand just in case you were wondering, all right? He was so dominant in high school basketball that he went on a 71 game win streak and of course was heavily recruited to play college basketball by none other than John Wooden. You know, we hear a lot about basketball players now that go up in block shots. Young Ferdinand didn't block shots. He just went up and took the ball out of the air because being as tall as he was and his ability to jump was incredible. As his basketball career continued in college, he smashed records because his team at UCLA went 88 and two. One of the losses he had was because someone scratched his cornea and he only scored 15 points. Now, because of his dominance in the game of basketball, the NCAA changed the game on him. That's a quote from the NCAA. He could dunk and score at will, so let's stop him to make the playing field level for everybody else. Because young Ferdinand, who you might know as Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Jr. was forced to stop slam dunking the ball, he figured out another way to score. And when he got into the NBA, you might know him now as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and he developed the iconic hookshot. To date, he is the number one scoring leader in the NBA. There is one active player that can catch him. His name is kind of, you might have heard him before, his name is LeBron James. LeBron needs to score 5,000 more points to reach what Kareem Abdul-Jabbar did. Now, why tell you a story about him? The game is changing. Kareem changed his game to continue to dominate and conferences like this one are about the ideas put into place to continue to dominate ag space globally. We are positioned and I research this daily. This part of the world is positioned to continue to see increases in yield and productivity as far as we can look. We have the technology, we have the soil, we have the practice and we have the climate for it. But taking care of the soil is critical to all of that. Now, the weather is gonna add chaos. The market's gonna add chaos and certainly global news is gonna add chaos. So therefore I can at least remove one major source of it for you by giving away my weather stuff for free. Every day, five days a week, my.nutrienexlutions.com, it was simple. When they hired me away from the university, I said, I would love to come work for you but will you please do me two things, all right? Do two things for me. One, let me continue to travel the country and speak. Because if you don't let me do that, I'll never get to talk to farmers like Rich and Rich right over here at lunch to learn what they've experienced and what goes on in their day-to-day lives. I will sit in a lab and code 24 hours a day and that's no good. Secondly, give the weather away for free. They said why? I said it's a huge source of chaos. Give it to them for free. Let me help explain it. It's right up there, my.nutrienexlutions.com. You can sign up for it. It's very simple. They will never bother you. Trust me, when I signed up for an account before I became an employee there, I used a separate email account in my nutrient account. I have not once been bothered by my own company. So it's free. I've been doing weather forecasting for 20 years. I have made all the mistakes in the book. Like this young man who's clearly never welded before. So what I'm trying to tell you here is I got all of this out of my system before you ever got to know me. And I can promise you a few things, okay? When it comes to the weather forecasting that I will provide for you, I will not sensationalize it. I will not sensationalize it. And I'll tell you when I don't know what's going on. And I can promise you this, if I don't know what's going on, I'm pretty sure nobody else will know either when it comes to the weather. But a steady hand with frequent updates and my focus in these videos is the bread basket of this country, all right? So with that, I'm gonna stop right there. I appreciate the time you gave me this afternoon. I am open for questions if we have time for it, but thank you so much for the invite. It was a lot of fun. Appreciate it. So what would you like me to do? Do we have time? I know it's 2.25. Couple questions, sure. Where's my first question? Who would like to ask something about what we presented today? Yes, yes. Long term on, two weeks to six weeks out. What do you trust the most about? To be honest, I don't have any trust in any of it because we know that errors compound easily once we get around about seven to 10 days. The best modeling center in the world though is the European model and they have something called the weeklies. We in the United States have a model called the CFS V2. It is pretty good, but on the long-term statistical average, it performs less than the European does. The problem with all long-range weather modeling is that they're way too sensitive to the initial conditions that they're initialized with. So we start the model. Whatever they have, they tend to continue. Maybe here's a better scenario. Let's imagine we're gonna model your behavior and I bring you up front here. We initialize the model. I'm gonna push you that way. The model will just keep me pushing you all the way to the wall. It doesn't often know when to break things up or to see when these little tiny perturbations we call them can disrupt the flow. And that's what gives us such extreme limitations on our weather forecasting. Who does the best job at distilling that model information and giving it to you? Right now, I think the only place that you're gonna go to get good information on it would be from a professional, not a company. Me showing you the output. Because if you're getting it from an app and this is not to throw anybody out of the bus. But when you get some apps that show you like, oh, here's your day by day for the next 45 days. That is garbage. To get it right is so hard. And by the way, if they could get it right 45 days out, they would never give it to you. Like that's the thing we gotta remember about all of this. So I'll show it to you, by the way, so our full new subscription to the European model starts in about a week and a half. And on that webpage I showed you up here, I'm actually gonna be giving away four free everyday a two pager. You can download or look at on the web. That is all my favorite models, including all the 45 day forecasts that we get from the European Center. It'll be free, you can all look at it. I'm not gonna charge you a dime for it. Excellent question. Another question for me. Yes. What's your views on global warming and if it's usually then, what's the specs on the weather? Well, can I ask, let me address that question by coming back to the idea of belief, right? Okay. So, do I have the option to believe that the chair you're sitting in is made of atoms and molecules? I've never seen them, but I know you're sitting in a chair that's made up of something, right? Or do I have the option to believe in germ theory? Like that there are germs that make us sick or like think about infant mortality rate or maternal mortality rate when we didn't understand that washing our hands before delivering babies would make people sick. I don't have a choice to believe in or not believe in a fact. Okay. So, with that as a setup, I have zero political agenda when it comes to climate change. If I had a political agenda, I'd never get invited to speak anywhere ever again. Okay. All that I am is a giant nerd. My wife can confirm this. It's amazing that I can even dress myself in the morning. When I look at systematic change, which I showed you with precipitation today, when I look at that systematic change, I have to try to understand what's driving it. And when we look at the changes we've seen most recently in climate, the longer term averages as they adjust. The number one thing that I notice is that the changes we're seeing right now are the most abrupt we've ever measured historically. We're not smashing records of global temperature. It's been wetter, it's been hotter, it's been drier, it's been colder historically. But the thing we're all studying is why is the change been so quickly so lately? We wanted to know if it was because of the sun or because of volcanoes. We wanna know if it had something to do with Earth's albedo, how bright it is. We wanted to understand if it had something to do with how we're measuring things. Are we measuring it wrong? And we've been studying this now for four or five decades. And by the only thing we can draw back on to show us some conclusive evidence as to the change is that a consequence, and it's a good consequence, all right, of industrialization is that we burn a very carbon-rich fuel source. We put more CO2 into the atmosphere. Okay. Now when that happens, carbon dioxide is a critical gas for life on Earth. 99% of the air you breathe is nitrogen and oxygen. If you got rid of what's left over, the last 1%, carbon dioxide, water vapor, methane, all that stuff, just got rid of it and made it all 100% nitrogen and oxygen. Earth's temperature, because we're so far from our nearest star, the sun, would drop 60 degrees. We'd be an ice planet because we have so much water. But with just the little addition of carbon dioxide and water vapor primarily, Earth's average temperature climbed 60 degrees and life flourishes here. I mean, I was in Atlanta, gosh, when was that? Last fall, parts of I-75 are eight lanes wide and yet in the cracks, in the middle of that interstate, grass grows, and I can't imagine how, it's amazing to think about how life flourishes here. But it's sensitive to small variations in those gases. We've increased carbon dioxide. I said it's a product of global industrial revolution. Yeah, but you know what else has been a product of that? Our livelihoods have increased. The way in which we live and enjoy those lives has increased. You can sit in a room here with all of these creature comforts and it's made life possible. But as a result, we are seeing a systematic warming of our climate. That's the whole thing. Let me actually get to the real answer to your question. When I was at the U.S. Grain Council meeting yesterday, I was not asked to talk about weather at all. My entire talk with those folks, they wanted me to tell them what was going on with climate change. And so here it is, this is my U.S. Grains talk and I want to show you this side right here. Now it's a little small on the screen, but for this is for the whole of the Corn Belt. Since 1948, and the question is why 1948, that is the beginning of kind of the modern era of the best instrument record we have in the United States. That's 71 year time period plus it begins the what's called the reanalysis time period. Our maximum temperature trend, you see it right here for the Corn Belt is actually down. This does not mean you won't have hot summers, but the trend is all I care about and it's down. Where we are experiencing warming in the mid part of the United States is in our overnight low temperatures. Our actual temperature trend here is flat. This is not true around the world. Do you remember the picture I showed you of the flooding in St. Louis? That was because the Beer Institute of America invited me down to talk about climate change for two and a half hours as their plenary speaker. I said, two and a half hours? And they said, yeah, come on down. By the way, if the Beer Institute ever asked you to go anywhere, you go. Because that was so much fun for stories I can tell you all about later. But anyways, while I was down there, they were very concerned because they have noticed that the United States in all of the change we've observed over the last 150 years or even over the last 70 years seems to be the most insulated, especially in the bread basket to all of these changes. And they want to know why. I said, part of it is our latitude. The other part of it is our north, south-running mountains, the Rockies. I said, other places in the world and all they wanted me to talk about was Germany. You ever seen those Sam Adams commercials where the guy's like rubbing his face in hops? That's because Germany's had a systematic warming and drawing bias that is making irrigation efforts to grow hops difficult. So all the hops are coming back over to Washington State and they want to know about it. So I think about all these things and I come back to the question of what does this mean to our productivity? Climate change as we are measuring and observing it, regardless of the cause, let's just forget the cause. That is super beneficial to us. And here's why. This next figure here is from Madison, Wisconsin. Since the weather station, NOAA-approved weather station went up in 1960 and Madison they've added a month to their frost-free season. Where I live in Illinois, we've added 10 days to our frost-free season. You talk to multi-generational farmers in Illinois and we say, when did grandpa plant corn? May 15 to May 20, almost to May 30. When did you, when did dad plant corn? May 7 to May 15. When do you plant corn? April 15th. And I'm like, of course you can because we're getting a systematic shift earlier in our last frost date. This is for Fargo. I'm sorry I didn't bring any data for here. But look at how steady things were. You have a weather station in Fargo that started collecting data in 1900. And it's very steady until about 1960s and 70s. And the slope on the end of that curve is 35 days. So that trend I can't ignore. And no, I'm not looking at the longer-range models beyond this. I'm only looking at trend. And that systematic warming here is the reason why this, part of the reason why this is a reality. This was published by FarmDoc Daily. It looked at the change in acreages for soybeans from 2011 to 16. I went over a longer time period from NASA, 1990 to 2018. Now there are many reasons why we've switched over to growing a lot of soybeans here. But the real thing is we are being able to do it better, right? And we've seen a North Dakota, which is this line right here, nearly 7 million acres increase since 1990 in soybeans. And year on year, we're getting a more viable crop out of this area. I mean, the last time we've had frost that ended a season where we didn't plant late anyway, was quite some time ago. And I look at all these changes and I get to report to U.S. farmers that that change with the excess of water if we manage soil health continues to make us productive for a long time. You will never hear that from a politician. You will never hear our president tweet about it that way. And you'll never hear the other side tell you about it that way. In fact, they like to blame all this problem on cow farts, which is a big misunderstanding of how all that works, right? So this is the real data from a real nerd telling you how it's changing. And I think that if we as an industry choose to ignore change based on maybe political ideology is a bad recipe for future success. Now, what do we know about this industry? It is an industry of constant change and I am literally just reporting to you what the data show us. I have no bias one way or the other. I just need to let everybody know what could possibly change your productivity. And these are the changes I'm seeing. The central part of the United States is in the best position to handle the global change that's going on. And we absolutely must reap the benefits of this. Thank you.