ALT Sheila Baber '21 says, 'I like to say that I started my career looking upwards at the night sky, only to turn 180 degrees to look downward towrd the earth.'

ALT The Crop Cycle Detection model analyzes changes in NDVI over time to identify individual growing seasons. In this example, the model detects three cropping cycles and estimates the start, peak, and end of each season. Orange points show the raw NDVI observations, while the blue line shows the processed, interpolated time series used by the model.

ALT These maps show tillage patterns during the study period. The left map indicates the percentage that a given field used low intensity tillage during the study period, while the right map indicates how frequently the given field changed from low- to high-intensity or high- to low-intensity tillage during the study period. From this, we can see that many of the fields in the SW corner of the study area (on the left map) remained high-intensity tillage during the entirety of the study. Likewise, we can see that a small number of fields (those in blue scattered across the study area in the left map) stayed low-intensity tillage during the entirety of the study period. And in the right map, the red fields changed with 100% frequency, meaning that those fields changed annually during the study period. Blue fields in this map did not change tillage intensity year to year.

ALT This map shows the typical impacts of El Nino to the continental U.S. and Canada during Northern Hemisphere winter. (Image credit: NOAA)

ALT Location and timing of likely above- and below-average precipitation related to El Niño events. Source: NOAA, CHC, FEWSNET

ALT Subnational yield anomalies across the larger producing season in bimodal areas, as determined by production values in the 2000-2020 period, relative to expected yields during past El Niño events. El Niño events are identified based on the value of the Relative Oceanic Niño Index in Oct-Dec.