Could you talk a little bit more? What have those regional differences been? And what's kind of been driving the difference between what people are seeing in northern Ohio or southern Ohio or eastern or western? Can you just talk a little bit more to that?

Yeah, actually, I'll go all the way back to winter setting us up for this season.

You know, the last two years we've had some pretty significant drought conditions.

2024, certainly the 13% in D4, mostly southeastern Ohio, and then D3 or severe drought across northwest Ohio.

And we waited a long time throughout last winter, this past winter, to kind of make up for some soil moisture deficits.

We carried dry and drought conditions really into the spring.

across northwest Ohio.

If you could, maybe talk about what are we setting up? As much as you can tell, what are we setting up for this next year?

What are those long term impacts? What do those look like in terms of some of the rainfall that farmers have experienced this year?

Yeah, with farming, it's always timing of the rain that's really important.

I think with the wet spring, obviously, that can set up a lot of conditions with increased erosion and nutrient loss, certainly planting windows being smaller.

Now we've got our harvest windows are smaller because we're just not seeing the extended dry periods.

We've seen big impacts on hay production and feed.

especially across our southern counties now where they've not had very many cuttings.

There's certainly as many cuttings as usual, and there's some question about quality.

Talk about some of your research on that front.

What's the forecast as farmers get ready, these combines ready for the field? What's the forecast? Are we going to get a good long stretch to run or storm's going to bother us this fall?

You know, you sure have it right in terms of last August compared to this August.

We now officially, as of this morning, August 2026 is the wettest August on record for Ohio back to 1895. following last August, which is the driest.

You can't swing any more extreme to that year to year.

So quite something out there.

Of course, the recent rains here in September, probably good for some of that late planted stuff, right? So to kind of catch up on some things and stuff that's still got a ways to go.

But as far as conditions moving forward, heat and humidity are hanging around here in early September.

So is there anything that you're watching out there that can still throw us a curveball this fall?

And Aaron, when you think about the way we are looking at addressing climate change, do you feel that there is enough urgency given to this issue? And if so, what would you like to see change or what do you think we're doing well?

Yeah, I think this is similar to what's already been expressed in terms of folks that have been involved in these actions for a long time.

There are certain groups in certain areas.

You can think about states and different cities and municipalities, different groups, gardening groups or farmer groups or other groups where urgency has been a little bit more on the forefront.

A lot of it comes down to the way of life for everyone that's being changed or altered by the changing weather patterns, whether that's a farmer having to make decisions about when to plant or when to harvest, what crops to grow, whether it's somebody in city and urban planning that has to design infrastructure to withhold really large amounts of water over very short periods of time.

I think those folks are on the front lines of urgency right certainly I think that that's important and a lot of folks have embraced that you know obviously there's different scales of action there's there's the the local and the municipal and regional planning commissions that get involved but you know obviously at the state level or federal level you know we've seen you know sort of how that's played out here over the last several years in terms of Certainly around economics and profitability is always a way to go, markets, technology.

All of these things bring climate really into the foray if you think about how we're all impacted by these things.

And Aaron, can you tell us what changes are we seeing in Ohio's agricultural production rates as temperatures rise and rainfall increases?

And it could be on the dry side.

Not just because of El Nino, but what I look at it, yeah, we've had very much, we've had some short-term improvements

to those conditions with the recent rainfall.

But we're really coming off some big highs.

2017, 18, and 19 are three of the top 10 wettest years in Ohio.

And we've seen declining precipitation trends really since then, back toward the long-term increase.

It's kind of interesting, you know, because we get these droughts, and we've had some big droughts, but then we also oscillate to these very wet periods, even in drought years, and back and forth.

That's kind of a key signature of how our weather pattern has evolved here in Ohio.

So let's start first with what is El Niño?

Yeah, so El Niño really refers to a specific phase of what we call tropical sea surface temperature, so think off the coast of Ecuador and Peru along the equator to the west of South America.

So we're looking at that area of the tropical Pacific Ocean, and we're looking at the sea surface temperatures, the water temperature, and we're comparing that to a long-term average.

When they are warmer than average, then we, we call that phase an El Niño phase.

So we just came off of back-to-back La Niña seasons, so cooler than average sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific in the years of '24, '25 and also '25, '26.

We've experienced some accelerated warming in that region toward El Niño.

So I think the latest Climate Prediction Center outlook calls for an, uh, 82% chance of El Niño forming here as we head into start of the summer.

What are the effects that we can expect to see from the El Niño this summer?