Purdue recently joined and became one of twenty US states that are in the NEWA network. NEWA is a partnership of land grant universities and grower associations. If you live in one of the states listed, you can buy a weather station for your farm and connect to NEWA. For Indiana growers, this means your membership is covered in full. If you live in a different state, see the NEWA Partners page to check out the Ricky Bobby branding and find out more about your membership status.
What is NEWA?
The Network for Environment and Weather Applications (NEWA) delivers weather data from weather stations primarily located on farms through the Internet at newa.cornell.edu and automatically calculates and displays weather data summaries, crop production tools, and integrated pest management (IPM) forecasts.
How does NEWA and a weather station benefit me?
- Promotes better and more precise IPM, reduced pesticide use, improved environmental protection.
- Better crop management, improved crop quality, improved yield.
- Enhanced decision support.
Okay, I’m interested. How does it work?
NEWA works with Onset Data Loggers and KestrelMet (weather stations) which are configured for NEWA’s agricultural production tools. These stations provide the data to the NEWA system, and look like this:
Figure 1. HOBOLINK data summaries from the weather station.
In this format, the data isn’t super helpful for most people, but I know I piqued your interest if you’ve read this far. Keep reading…
How does NEWA help in crop management decision making?
As a nerd, the data above is really exciting, but it doesn’t help me to make decisions. To do that, the data needs to be entered into appropriate mathematical models correctly to make it useful. Most people don’t want to sit down and calculate degree days (DD) and growing degree days (GDD) with base temperatures for different crops, and then use that data for additional models to forecast insect hatch dates and plant disease infection periods. I sure don’t (it’s super tedious and easy to make mistakes). So, NEWA does this calculation for you and displays the data:
Figure 2a.
Figure 2b.
Figure 2c. Figure 2a-c. Tools are provided in graphical form (top) and table form (middle and bottom). These data are from an orchard in Hendersonville, NC, taken 3/22/22).
There are over 20 weather-based IPM forecast tools in NEWA. Many tools in NEWA address apple and grape decision support. However, vegetable growers can also benefit from the system. Currently, it provides forecast tools for insect pest management include cabbage maggot and onion maggot; disease management include cercospora leaf spot of table beets, onion disease model, potato disease model and tomato disease model. Users can also access all weather data and growing degree days calculation.
For more information:
Visit the NEWA online Knowledge Base to quickly get started with NEWA 3.0
Vegetable management resources
Additional user support
Contact the NEWA Help Desk if you have any problems, have questions or (especially) if you find a bug or glitch. Do this by sending an email to support@newa.zendesk.com with details, screenshots, and other information that might be helpful for a quick resolution.
For additional information:
https://newa.cornell.edu/crop-and-pest-management/
https://nyshs.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Carroll-Pages-19-24-from-NYFQ-spring-book-2017-4.pdf