Huge congratulations to Kurt Waldman (Geography, Indiana U.) and Noemi Vergopolan (Civil and Environmental Engineering, Princeton U.) for our new paper - “Cognitive biases about climate variability in smallholder farming systems in Zambia” (In press at Weather, Climate and Society).
We compare farmer’s perceptions of rainfall onset with satellite-gauge-derived rainfall data and hyper-resolution soil moisture estimates. We find that farmers perceive that rains are arriving later than they are and that farmers rely on heuristics about rainy season onset to decide on when to plant maize.