CALMER TIMES AHEAD....

The weather is going to be fairly quiet over the next week. The rivers will still be an issue, though. The latest along the Cedar is there is an ice jam in Vinton. The crest forecast has gone up in Cedar Rapids.

The 18.6 foot crest is expected to occur late Monday into Tuesday. That would tie the 7th highest crest on record in Cedar Rapids. This will cause issues in parts of the downtown area and in the city of Palo. Many other rivers (the Mississippi, Rock, Wapsi, etc) will experience moderate to major flooding as well. 

The good news is the water will fall fast (in most spots) through the week as the weather remains calm. 

Very little precipitation is expected over the next seven days. In fact, the next decent chance for precipitation won't arrive until the weekend. 

We will continue to keep an eye on the potential for more flooding. A large snowpack still sits up to the north. 

A lot of it sitting near the headwaters of Iowa and Illinois rivers. There won't be much precipitation to melt the snow but there will be warmer temperatures. See this meteogram for Cedar Rapids as an example: 

It will be able to get even warmer now since we have bare ground. The mild temperatures will melt the snow and that will keep the ground saturated and the river levels higher than normal. If any heavy spring rains come we will be looking at more crests on our rivers. 

For now it doesn't look like anything is coming down the pike in the next ten days. We will hope for a gradual snow melt up to the north. 

One more thing I wanted to mention is that little dose of snow we got added onto an already record breaking winter. 

At least the snow melted quickly! 

RK