Date Issued: 21 March 2000
Disease location(s): Western Cuba
Trajectory Start (shown by black star * on map): San
Angelo de Los Banos, Cuba
Synopsis of Transport Episode: Below is a sequence of trajectories from Friday, February 25 through Sunday, February 27. Saturday's trajectory, on February 26, is the one that brought live spores into Florida. During this weekend, a cold front was moving from west to east through the Deep South and the northern Gulf of Mexico. As one can see below, Saturday's trajectory took a long two-day curve into north-central Florida. The centerline crossed the peninsula during Sunday evening, when some showers occurred. Satellite images during the day on Saturday and Sunday showed fair skies on Saturday and partly cloudy skies on Sunday. Despite the (at most) partially favorable conditions for survivable transport on two consecutive days, enough spores survived and must have been washed out over northern Florida. This transport event would have been given a Low Threat and Low Risk rating had it been a regular production forecast.
We provide the other two trajectories to show how much shift can occur in the prevailing surface winds from day to day. These two pathways for Friday and Sunday are much more indicative of the daily trajectories observed between February 14 and March 3. None of the trajectories produced for many days before and after February 26 move anywhere close to the Florida production areas. Given this fact..... the observed disease status in the Alachua County plant beds.... and the arrival of the trajectory in Florida during the time of the shower activity on the 27th, we feel confident that this transport event must have been the one that resulted in the blue mold infections discovered March 21.
Friday's trajectory:
Saturday's trajectory:
Sunday's trajectory:
Local Weather in North Carolina is available from the WRAL-TV5 Weather Center, which also has links to other weather sites.
Prepared by: Thomas Keever, C.E. Main, J.M. Davis, T.A. Melton, and P. B. Shoemaker, Departments of Plant Pathology and Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 29695-7616. This forecast gives the anticipated future track of released Blue Mold spores, weather conditions over the region and along the forecast pathway, and an estimate of potential disease spread over the next two days.