09/04/2026
Florida growers have a free public asset most operations underuse: FAWN — the Florida Automated Weather Network, 42 stations from Jay to Homestead, run by UF/IFAS since 1997, reporting every 15 minutes.
It's better instrumented than most people realize. Air temperature at three heights: 2 ft, 6 ft, 30 ft. Soil temperature at 4 inches. Solar radiation, dew point, wet bulb, and Penman-Monteith ET.
That three-height temperature profile is the part worth stopping on. It's how you actually read an inversion on a cold night — the difference between running cold protection because the block needs it and running it because the forecast made everyone nervous.
The honest limit nobody mentions: in Florida, the number that decides your week is rainfall. And rainfall does not travel. An August cell drops an inch and a half on a station eight miles away and nothing on your block. ET travels reasonably well — it's designed to. Rain doesn't travel at all.
So we use FAWN for what it's genuinely good at — the demand baseline, the freeze and inversion picture, the wet-bulb and dew-point context behind spray and chemical timing windows — and we don't pretend a regional station knows what fell on your field.
What AIQ adds:
— Pull the nearest relevant station at 15-minute resolution, turn ET into crop water demand by stage and canopy
— Check it against satellite actual-ET, so you see need vs. use instead of one side of it
— Reconcile station rainfall against radar and any on-site gauges, and flag when they disagree — because that disagreement is usually the most useful thing on the screen
— Where on-site sensors exist, those win. FAWN becomes the backup, not the boss
Free public data, used with judgment, beats expensive data used blindly.
Which of your blocks would you actually bet got the rain the nearest station recorded last week?
