Introduction to Ag-Radar

  1. Use your common sense in applying this information. Ag-Radar provides educated guesses to supplement other sources for making farm management decisions. The best decision tools are the experience and knowledge between your ears, supported by input from direct observations.  Final judgment and responsibility lie with the grower.  The University of Maine is not liable for over-reliance or other misuses of these weather-based estimates.
  2. Be cautious in extrapolating from one location to another.  Temperature, and especially rain, estimates for the nearest Ag-Radar site may not accurately reflect conditions at your location.
  3. Each table or chart shows the time and date when forecast values begin. If an older date is showing, use the “Refresh” function of your web browser.  This forces the browser to retrieve the current version of the file from the web instead of using an older version of the file stored on your computer from a previous browsing session.
  4. Ag-Radar is updated twice a day, seven days a week, starting at approximately 5:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. The update times for each site are shown below the “30 Day Temperature Chart” for that site.  Not all pages are updated every day.  Only those Ag-Radar web pages that will be affected by new weather information are updated each day.  For example, the apple flyspeck disease fungicide respray interval tables for August will not change until August dates come into the 10-day forecast range.  So those tables do not begin updating until late July.  For the same reason, once a table or chart has all of the data it will ever need, it stops being updated.
  5. To better understand how the estimates are made, read the background information pages link near the top of each model.  If you have questions or suggestions contact Glen Koehler at glen.koehler@maine.edu.