- Sep 18, 2020

HOW DRY I AM...NOT!

A couple weeks ago many of you were pleading for rain. And for good reason, a long dry August had really burned things up. Well, you know the saying, be careful what you wish for. The rains came in a big way. Here's what we've had so far this September. A swath in EC Iowa and WC Illinois showing 6-10 inches!

That puts September amounts in my area 3 to 4 times above what's normal.

By the way there was that little thing called a drought that had popped up. At least in my area you see in the graphic on the left that all that remains of that as of September 15th is a small patch of abnormally dry conditions in my southern counties. The map on the right shows conditions September 1st when many areas were in moderate drought.

Here's the same comparison centered on Iowa. You can really see the improvement in soil moisture conditions.

This time series shows measured drought conditions in Iowa since 2000. It's readily apparent that 2000 to 2007 was a dry period. 2008 to 20011 was wet. Then the big drought year of 2013 showed up book-ended by 2012 and 2014. Some periods of dryness appeared again in 2015 into the middle of 2018 followed by a wet end to 2018 and the majority of 2019. Then came the dryness of this summer. What's next?

At least in the short term a front has passed bringing cooler but pleasant weather which shows up nicely on the late day satellite image. Still some western forest fire smoke still evident from Iowa into the Plains..

This cooler brand of weather is expected to hold into Monday of next week. The EURO has this for highs in Cedar Rapids. The GFS is in good agreement.

It's a good thing we got what rain we did because the overall pattern looks dry for much of the next 2 weeks. This is what the EURO has for total rainfall through mid-day Wednesday of next week.