Past chill hours

General Fruit Growing
#1

Is there a site to find out your past years chill hours your area actually got?

Bonifay, FL 32425 zone 8b

#2

the simple sites listed in the old guides are gone, where you could put in a zip code and it would spit out a number. you can still use an extension service model tool. the oregon state extension tool has data for the whole country so it should work for you:

https://uspest.org/risk/models

  • choose weather station
  • unselect the default models and select “plant disease/other hour driven models” … “other” … one of chilling units (simple), chilling units (utah) or custom degree-hour accumulation
  • select a date range in the past. something like november 1 + 270 days should work to catch the full winter for you
  • click the refresh button at the top and wait, it’s slow

I did this for a station near tallahassee and got about 380 hours for the 2019-2020 winter with the simple model, does that sound right?

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#3

I don’t know of any on the national level, but at least a few states have something. Here’s one for Florida: http://agroclimate.org/tools/chill-hours-calculator/

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#4

Thanks for the site info. If I did it correctly the Chipley chill hours for winter 2018 was 739 and 2019 was 384, big difference. This will be a good site to explore. I checked out the last 5 years and the average chill hours was 609 which is pretty correct for the low hours predicted on the zones maps.

#5

I lived in Tallahassee for a few years. That sounds about right.