NDAWN Data Supports Smarter Crop Disease Management

By Scout Nelson

The North Dakota Agricultural Weather Network, known as NDAWN, is helping farmers make better crop management decisions through detailed weather and soil information.

NDAWN began in 1989 with six automated weather stations across North Dakota. The network now has about 250 stations across North Dakota, Minnesota, and northeastern Montana.

The system provides information on temperature, rainfall, wind, humidity, soil temperature, and soil moisture. This information supports agriculture, research, transportation, and other industries.

NDAWN first gained attention for its role in crop disease forecasting. Potato growers helped fund weather stations in the early 1990s to support late blight forecasting. Research also helped develop disease forecasting for sugarbeets.

Over time, NDAWN expanded its tools to cover small grains, canola, insects, crop growth, planting dates, and livestock comfort.

“It provides high-quality, localized weather and soil data tailored primarily for agriculture but useful across many sectors,” says Daryl Ritchison, NDAWN director and North Dakota state climatologist.

One of the network’s newer tools is the NDAWN White Mold Risk Maps for soybeans. The tool uses weather information to estimate conditions that may increase white mold disease risk.

NDSU soybean pathologist Wade Webster helped improve and validate the model using information from commercial soybean fields across North Dakota.

The tool uses temperature, humidity, and wind speed to help predict conditions linked to white mold infection.

“This tool can either help them make fungicide applications at the most effective times so that fungicides are having the maximum impact, and this also helps them to avoid applications when they are unnecessary so that they do not spend money on products that will not have a direct return on investment,” Webster says.

NDAWN also supports a real-time inversion alert system that helps identify conditions that can increase spray drift.

“NDAWN has the only real-time inversion alert system in the United States,” Ritchison says.

The network may also support future AI-based weather models. Ritchison says combining real-time station data with crop and pest information could create more accurate, location-specific forecasts.

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