Congratulations to the winner of the AGMET Austin Bourke Bronze medal, Pooja Sharma. The Austin Bourke Bronze Medal is presented for a recent significant contribution to Irish agrometeorology, applied environmental meteorology, biometeorology or a related discipline. From the nominations received an award committee deemed Pooja’s work in the area “System modelling and life cycle assessment of dairy farms on heavy wet soils” most deserving of the award. Pooja is a PhD student at the School of ...

The Inaugural Tom Keane AGMET Lecture - Tuesday 5th Sept 2017, Glasnevin, Dublin The Inaugural Tom Keane Lecture will be given by Met Éireann’s Head of Forecast Division, Gerald Fleming, with a talk entitled ‘A half-century of weather forecasting in Ireland’ This talk will consider how weather forecasting has evolved since the early days of AGMET – from charts that were plotted and analysed by hand, through the explosion of data from weather satellites, the automation of surface weather ...

The Irish Joint Working Group on Applied Agricultural Meteorology (AGMET) is pleased to invite nominations for the award of The Austin Bourke Bronze Medal for a recent significant contribution to agrometeorology, applied environmental meteorology, biometeorology or a related discipline. Closing date for nominations is 12:00pm, Friday 4th August 2017. Download the application details. Eligibility Scientists based in Ireland, or working on issues specific to Ireland, are eligible. The awa...

' The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Meteorological Organization have signed a memorandum of understanding to deepen cooperation to respond to climate variability and climate change, which, according to the agreement, "represents an urgent and potentially irreversible threat to human societies, natural ecosystems and food security. ' * Source WMO news ' Through their strengthened partnership, the two organizations will work on strengthening agro-meteorological servi...

The European Commission MARS (Monitoring Agricultural ResourceS) programme publish regular bulletins commenting on observed and forecast crop growth. In the May 2017 publication it suggests that there is a positive outlook for winter crops across Ireland and the UK. “Winter crops are generally faring well, despite a pronounced rain deficit. Overall the yield outlook is positive, but more rain is needed to sustain high yield potentials.” See the full publication at JRC MARS Bulletin Vol....

The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine advises farmers in relation to the predicted risk of infection in livestock based on the advice received from the Nematodirus Advisory Group. Source: DAFM - Press Release, April 2017 About the disease "Nematodirosis is a severe disease of lambs six to twelve weeks of age, which become infected through ingesting large numbers of infective larvae present on contaminated pasture. The life cycle of Nematodirus battus is unlike that of other...

This May Met Éireann will be launching its ‘MÉRA’ climate reanalysis dataset. This 35 year meteorological gridded dataset will have many potential applications within the Irish Agrometeorology community "Climate reanalysis is a systematic approach used to produce meteorological datasets for climate monitoring and research. They are created using a fixed version of a forecast model and a data assimilation system which utilises historical observations and they produce parameters that are phy...

Using a surface energy balance approach to characterise agro-environmental zones in Ireland in support of on-farm decision making Background "Farming, particularly pastoral farming, involves the management of biological processes within a specific ecological and weather environment to generate income which in turn is also a function of the costs of inputs used on farm and prices for the outputs of the farm activity. Biological processes exhibit significant spatial and temporal variability whic...