A Century of Monitoring Weather and Crops: The Weekly Weather and Crop Bulletin

Abstract

Publication of a national weekly weather summary called the Weekly Weather Chronicle began in 1872. This summary was the precursor of today's Weekly Weather and Crop Bulletin (WWCB), a publication that reports global weather and climate conditions relevant to agricultural interests, as well as current national activities and assessments of crop and livestock conditions. The WWCB is produced by the Joint Agricultural Weather Facility (JAWF), a world agricultural weather information center located in the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) headquarters in Washington, D.C., and jointly staffed by units of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Climats. Analysis Center and USDA's World Agricultural Outlook Board and National Agricultural Statistics Service. Besides featuring charts and tables (e.g., temperature and precipitation maps and crop progress and condition tables), the WWCB contains summaries and special stories highlighting significant weather events affecting agriculture, such as droughts, torrential rains, floods, unusual warmth, heat waves, severe freezes, heavy snowfall, blizzards, damaging storms, and hurricanes.