Editor's Note: Each year, DTN publishes our choices for the Top 10 ag news stories of the year as selected by DTN analysts, editors and reporters. This year, we're counting them down from Dec. 18 to Dec. 31. On Jan. 1, 2025, we will look at some of the runners-up for the year. Today, we continue the countdown with No. 6: The massive impact of an active weather pattern that brought different types of weather -- beneficial, as well as severe and challenging -- in different places, at different times of the year. This includes good crops in the Corn Belt, large wildfires, flooding in the Midwest and Southeast, to several dangerous record-setting hurricanes.

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OMAHA (DTN) -- When it comes to describing the weather impact in 2024, it isn't one extreme event that stood out to make No. 6 on DTN's countdown.

"Honestly, the weather wasn't really all that extreme, ... (but) the impacts from it were massive in different parts of the country at different times of the year," noted DTN Ag Meteorologist John Baranick.

"Our weather pattern was so active that we just kept getting system after system roll through," he explained. They weren't big outbreaks for the most part, but it was kind of "nickel-and-dimed" through the season, he said.

Depending on where you live, you may have experienced some of the events that stood out. These included wildfires in the United States and Canada, flooding in the Midwest, derechos in the Corn Belt and other areas, a late-season flash drought, and hurricanes that could be both beneficial and very destructive.

But Baranick stressed that, thanks to a delayed La Nina pattern in 2024, a lot of the Corn Belt ended up with pretty good weather, "until you got to the very end, tail end of the season, when we were finishing up fall (harvest) and just took a couple of bushels off the top. But other than that, ... it was really good weather for most of the year for planting all the way to harvest. Harvest weather was great. And you're talking about the Corn Belt, or outside of Corn Belt to ... honestly, everywhere."

However, he did add that one area had a few challenges: "It was in the Southeast where they had weeks of drought, then weeks of heavy rain, then weeks of drought and then hurricanes."

LARGEST EVER TEXAS WILDFIRE

From December 2023 through March was a super El Nino, with limited precipitation in the dry Western Corn Belt at the start of the year (https://www.dtnpf.com/...).

However, El Nino-related precipitation increased vegetation growth in the Southern Plains and provided fuel for a megafire that caught national attention. The record-breaking Smokehouse Creek Fire in the northeastern Texas Panhandle and western Oklahoma started in late February and burned more than 1 million acres -- more than 1,500 square miles -- and became the largest in Texas history and even one of the largest fires in U.S. history. (https://www.dtnpf.com/...)

Texas farmers and ranchers shared with DTN how it was the worst fire they saw in their lifetimes as it affected their pastures, killed thousands of cattle and other livestock, and destroyed their homes. (See https://www.dtnpf.com/...) and (https://www.dtnpf.com/.... See a first-hand account at https://www.dtnpf.com/....)

Weather conditions influenced other wildfires to break out in late winter into spring in United States and Canada, including some evacuations of people in various communities, and affected air quality in both countries.

By near the end of 2024, more than 13 million acres had burned in Canada and 8.6 million acres in the U.S.

HEAVY RAINS

Spring saw some heavy rains, such as those in April that triggered floods in Missouri, Kansas, Illinois and as far south as eastern Texas and southwest Louisiana. (https://www.dtnpf.com/...) This led to some planting delays.

But for those farmers in South Dakota, southern Minnesota and northwest Iowa, June brought heavy rains that hit the crops they already had in the ground.

"It was in late June, so people had already planted, and it just kind of washed everything out," said Baranick.

Some areas got 12-18 inches of rain in two days, which caused flooding, saturated soil and standing water to areas that had moderate to severe drought a year before. (See blog by DTN Meteorologist Teresa Wells at https://www.dtnpf.com/...)

Asked what he thought was one of the most influential weather events of the year on crop production, Baranick pointed to the flooding. "I think it was probably the flooding in the Midwest, in terms of corn and soybean production, just because it wiped out very fertile areas of the country. And it was significant. I mean, driving through there was pretty remarkable, seeing all the variability in crop development and people that weren't able to plow anything over ... It was all drowned out. And then some areas where it was a mix of really, really short yellow corn, and move 100 yards, and it looks fantastic. And then other areas that, you know, look amazing. So, I mean the variability in that part of the country was kind of the worst of it all."

BILLION-DOLLAR WEATHER DISASTERS

But even before those heavy June rains, it was already becoming a costly year for weather disasters.

As DTN Ag Meteorologist Emeritus Bryce Anderson noted on June 12 in a blog, "The first five months already stands at 11 $1-billion disasters. That five-month total is higher than many annual totals since $1 billion weather and climate disaster tracking began in 1980 ... For more perspective, the year 2024 already has more $1-billion confirmed weather and climate disasters than each of the entire years from 1980-1997."

The billion-dollar events included "two tornado events that affected the central, southern and eastern U.S. at the end of April and beginning of May; one severe weather event that hit the central and eastern U.S. at the end of February; and a derecho event that affected portions of the South in mid-May."