▶ 2026 Early Fall Ag Weather Outlook for Wisconsin

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All right.

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Thanks so much, Laura, and good afternoon, everyone.

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Like Laura said, I’m Josh Bendorf.

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I work as the climate Outreach specialist within the Wisconsin State Climatology office, which is a part of the Division of Extension.

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We do these periodic ag weather updates as part of the Badger Crop Connect series.

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Last one we did was in early July.

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A lot has happened since then.

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So I’m going to do a little bit of a recap of where we’ve how we’ve gotten to where we are today and as well as outlooks for October, the rest of fall into early winter.

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So first to do a little recap of July and August.

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So these two maps on your screen are county average temperature rankings for the month of July and for the month of August.

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So what this is, is comparing 2026 to all the years that we have on record in Wisconsin, which for in this case goes back to 1895. So,

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How does 2026 for July and August stack up against all those other years? Focusing on July first, on July, temperatures were above normal pretty much statewide in Wisconsin, temperature departure from average on the state level was 3.8°F and it ranked as our 11th warmest fall on record.

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Those counties there that are shaded in darker orange had a top 15 July warmest July on record.

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August was a little bit more average, so a lot more of the counties were shaded there in gray or in the lighter orange color.

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Temperatures only departed by about 1 to 2°F above normal for the month of August and it ranked as our 44th warmest August on record.

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So pretty warm July, but more of an average August, but there was a lot of variability around those average temperatures.

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This this graph from Madison at the Dane County Regional Airport really shows that these are daily, daily temperatures.

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So the blue bars are the the height of the blue bars.

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That is the difference between the maximum and minimum temperatures for each individual day during the months of July and August.

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And so we can see at Madison there was a lot of variability, especially in July.

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There was a lot of ups and downs.

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For example, we had some extreme heat during the month of July.

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So those days that I have circled there, those are days where we had Wisco net stations in the Madison area that had heat indices of 95 to 100°F.

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So very warm, very humid.

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Not too long after though, we had nights that were getting down into the 60s and even into the 50s.

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But then as we got towards the end of July, July 26th and July 27th, we had heat indices of 100° or well exceeding 100° in some cases.

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But then as we see on the right hand side of this chart, that temperatures were a lot more average during the month of August.

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We didn’t have those big temperature swings during the month of August.

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Same chart, but for the Wausau airport.

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Again, we see those ups and downs during the month of July with more average temperatures during August.

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Turning now to precipitation, these are county level precipitation ranks for July and August.

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So looking at July, we had a mixed bag across the state.

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Overall, it was, it ranked on the drier end.

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It was our 32nd driest July on record for the state.

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But we see there’s a lot of different, a lot of variability from county to county.

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So those counties there that are shaded in dark darker brown, those counties had a top 15 driest July on record.

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So a lot of those were in the North Central part of the state as well as some South Central counties.

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But as you got further west along the Mississippi River, it was actually an above average precipitation for the month of July.

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And in the case of La Crosse County, it was one of their top 15 wettest.

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Going ahead one month to the month of August, a lot of our driest counties were up in the northern part of Wisconsin.

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So a lot of the northern counties had a top 15 driest July on record.

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But then down in the southern part of the state, things were more average to above normal.

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And in the southeast and South Central counties where they had a very dry July, ended up having a pretty wet August, some in some cases a top 15 wettest August on record.

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So kind of flip flopping between one or the other down in the southern part of the state.

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So what this meant for summer as a as a whole.

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So June, July and August combined, the northern half of the state tended to be drier than normal top 10 driest for those counties there in the North Central part of the state, shaded and dark brown.

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And as you got into the central and southern counties, things tended to be average to slightly above average.

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What I did was I picked out the driest meteorological stations in Wisconsin between July 1st and September 21st.

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And these were all pretty much in northern Wisconsin.

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So just jumping back one slide here, you can see how northern Wisconsin pretty much across the board had a drier than normal summer.

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And so we had stations up in the northern part of the state, like in Florence County and Bayfield County that had less than 1/3 to about 1/4 of what would be expected for precipitation during this.

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We would expect about 10 inches of precipitation from July 1st to September 21st.

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In northern Wisconsin.

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These stations were seeing anywhere from two to three 3 1/2 inches of precipitation, so well below normal up in that part of the state and what this meant for drought.

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The map on the left is from the last time I did one of these ag weather updates.

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That’s from back on July 9th.

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And that shows that the only drought that we had in the state back in early July was just South of Madison and parts of Dane, Green, and Rock counties.

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Just that little area of D0 with the rest of the state either not being in any category or being abnormally dry.

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But because of that dry July and dry August that we had, especially up in our northern counties, drought really expanded, really jumped up in severity.

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We have area at the end of August, we had parts of Wisconsin, pretty much all of the northern part of the state was in at least D1 with a lot of D2 and even D3 up in the far northwest part of the state.

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So that’s where we were at the end of August.

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So now to looking at where we’ve come the last few weeks in September.

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So temperatures for September so far on these maps are a couple days old, but the the map on the left shows average temperatures for September 1st through September 21st.

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Down in the southern part of the state, it was mid to upper 60s, up north low 60s, and this was above normal across the board.

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In Wisconsin, you see on the map on the right, which shows average temperature departure from normal, the lighter shades were 2 to 4° above normal, the darker shades of brown 4 to 6° above normal.

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And we’ve had a lot of ups and downs in temperature during the month of September, which is kind of what we would expect for during a month of September, where we’re transitioning from summer into the fall.

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We would expect a little bit of both.

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And that’s what we got.

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I pulled this example from the Wittenberg Wisconet Station.

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This one is in Shawano County.

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You can see we had some days like September 1st where it was very summer, like where we had apparent temperature, which with this case in the summertime would be the heat index winter.

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That would be the wind chill.

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It’s just the feels like temperature.

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So on September 1st, it felt like 90° up in Wittenberg.

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We had dew points that were in the mid 60s and you can see how that varies from day-to-day.

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But a few weeks, just a few weeks after that, we had an overnight low that was close to freezing In Shawano County and in counties further north we have gotten down into the 20s during some nights in September.

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So again we had, you know some very summer like conditions, but we also had some very fall like conditions as well.

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Turning now to precipitation, accumulated precipitation for the month of September has really been concentrated in the southern part of the state and in the central part of the state.

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We see in those like the southern 2/3 of Wisconsin anywhere from about 4 to 8 inches of precipitation with localized areas of eight plus inches.

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And in the southern 2/3 of Wisconsin, it’s been above normal across the board, ample precipitation with for most folks receiving at least 150% of average precipitation.

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Some folks in the central and East Central parts of the state have received three to four times as much precipitation as they would have expected for these first 21 days of September.

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But things really taper off the further north that you get.

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Up.

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In the northern tiers of Wisconsin, precipitation totals of two inches or less were common and compared to normal, that’s 75% or less of normal precipitation.

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And we see an example there in Ashland and Iron Counties where we had 30% or less of normal precipitation where totals so far in September have been less than one inch.

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So what does all this mean for plant available water?

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So this is Wisconet 4 inch plant available water.

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So over the top 4 inches of soil, this is the amount of water represented as a depth that is available for plant roots to take up.

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So the current levels at the various Wisconet ag research farm locations are the dark blue bars.

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And then how does that compare to one month ago and two months ago?

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We see for the most part that September values have been higher than values back in late August or late July.

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A lot of these stations are in the southern part of the state where we’ve had ample precipitation during the month of September.

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We see locations like Arlington or Lancaster, Marshfield, Verona that have a good amount of plant available water at the four inch depth, higher values than a month ago.

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But at stations such as Rhinelander or Spooner or Woodruff, which is in Oneida County, those values are much lower ’cause that’s been a much drier part of the state.

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As of the latest NASS report, which came out on September 20th, what are the different categories for Wisconsin’s topsoil moisture?

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11% of the state right now has surplus topsoil moisture, 63% adequate and 26% short to very short.

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That those are statewide numbers.

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Those do vary a little bit from region to region.

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For example, the northwest counties are currently the driest right now.

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They have the driest topsoils, 45% of topsoil in the Northwest reporting district are for are short to very short.

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And somewhat not surprisingly, drought is still very much in place in northern Wisconsin because of the dry September we’ve had so far.

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And things have actually gotten a bit worse up in that part of the state.

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If you look at the August 2025 map, we see that we now have D4 or exceptional level drought in the far northwest part of the state.

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And this is the first time we’ve had D4 in the state since the fall of 2023.

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So we’ve been about three years since the last time we had this.

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Pretty much all of northern Wisconsin is at least in D1 areas like Stevens Point, Marshfield points to the north.

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But then as you get South of that, the southern half of the state is pretty much drought free and free of any kind of abnormal dryness thanks to that abnormally high precipitation that we’ve had during during the month of September and some near average levels for like the months of August and July.

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So drought and abnormal dryness have been eliminated across the southern part of the state, but further north drought is still very much an issue.

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And what does this mean for crop conditions?

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So this is a time series of the percent of corn, soybeans and pasture that are in good to excellent condition going back to the end of May.

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What we see in late May and early June, corn and soybeans were about 80% good to excellent and that stayed consistent through the through the month of June into the first part of July.

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But then in the around middle of July and then up to current day, things have steadily declined.

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Now we’re down to about 60% good to excellent in late September.

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Similarly with pasture where conditions peaked in mid to late June, but again since the middle part of July have steadily declined due to that dryness.

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That’s where we are current day.

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Now let’s look ahead to October and beyond.

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So the 8 to 14 day temperature and precipitation outlooks, this is getting into the first week of October.

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The probabilistic lean is towards near normal temperatures for pretty much all of Wisconsin and just a slight lean towards above normal precipitation statewide.

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Neither of these are strong leans by any means.

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For example, it’s only a 33 to 40% chance of above normal precipitation, but again, it’s just a slight lean in that direction.

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Not to say that below normal precipitation couldn’t happen, but the probabilities are a little bit higher for above normal precipitation.

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And just as a reminder, these don’t show how much above or below normal we’re expected to be, just which direction we’re more likely to go.

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And for context, you can see what the average temperature and precipitation for this seven day.

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Are on the right hand side there for the month of October.

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These are the CPC or Climate Prediction Center outlooks that came out about a week ago.

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Now for the month of October, we see a statewide lean towards above normal temperatures 33 to 40% odds.

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Precipitation is uncertain with equal chances, meaning we have roughly about a 33% chance of below, above and near normal.

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So we can’t say with with certainty which way things are gonna lean, but temperatures do show that statewide above normal lean.

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Again, you can see the normal temperature and precipitation for October on the right hand side.

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And I do want to point out that even though temperatures are expected to lean slightly above average, that October is the time of year we’re pretty much across all of Wisconsin that overnight lows will start to get below freezing.

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That’s this, around October is when we’d expect the first night that gets below freezing to occur.

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That happens a little bit earlier in northern Wisconsin compared to areas further South.

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But just keep that in mind as you have sensitive plants outside to keep an eye on those overnight lows as we get into October.

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And then looking ahead to the rest of fall into the first part of winter.

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So October through December, we have a statewide lean again for above normal temperatures, but it’s a little bit stronger than before than the October outlook.

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Now we’re looking at a 40 to 50% chance of above normal temperatures, but again precipitation still uncertain.

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And I do want to mention El Nino before I wrap up my presentation today that we are currently in a El Nino and a particularly strong El Nino right now.

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And that is that is going to that does have effects on our temperatures here in Wisconsin.

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And so this graph I have here on the left hand side is from the Climate Prediction Center.

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This shows by three month period the strength and probability of us being in an El Nino.

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So ASO is October, September, October, September, October, November, etcetera, etcetera.

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So these are three month periods and the probability that we’re going to be in El Nino or strong El Nino, you can see that most of these bars here are in that dark red shading means we have strong chance to be in a in a very strong El Nino phase, meaning that we have warm temperatures, warm ocean temperatures in the Southern Pacific.

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But what that means, what does that mean for us here in Wisconsin is that means temperatures are probably going to lean a little bit more towards above normal through the rest of fall into the first part of winter.

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We’ve seen that with the October through December outlook.

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The map here I have on the right shows November, December, January temperatures from previous strong El Nino year.

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So this is not an outlook.

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This is looking back at prior year and seeing the averages like what did temperatures do during those prior strong El Nino years.

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You can see the various El Nino years appear on the chart, but what we see across most of the upper Midwest for November, December, January is that when we are in a strong El Nino phase that we can expect above normal temperatures by about one to two degrees.

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Look, just averaging these past years, this is not an outlook.

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The outlook for November, December, January will be coming out in mid-October.

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But again we kind of expect that those warmer than normal temperatures will continue through the remainder of fall into winter.

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And then just to wrap up with drought, the seasonal drought outlook September 17th through December 31st, This is going through the remainder of the year.

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It’s expected that drought will persist across northern Wisconsin, the far northern part of the state, but there could be some improvement or removal that goes on outside of that region.

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We have seen some of that already.

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We saw a big room, we saw a fairly big removal of D0 and D1 in the southern parts of the state last week.

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We have a chance for some more rainfall coming up over the next 7 days into the 6 to 10 day outlook is also showing higher probabilities of above normal precipitation.

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So we could continue to chip away at drought over the next few weeks, but it but unfortunately that far northern part of Wisconsin looks like drought is going to continue up in that area.

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So with that, that’s all I have for you today.

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I’d be happy to take any questions or address any comments in the chat.

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But I would like to draw your attention to the QR code here on the screen.

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That’s our AgWOW user survey.

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If you’re a regular viewer of the Ag Weather Outlook for Wisconsin, we’d love to hear your feedback on what you think of the AgWOW so we can continue to improve that product.

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So with that, I’ll pass it back over to Laura.