Extreme northeastern Iowa got clipped by a rather intense band of snowfall on Saturday. A few reports of six inches or more were found within Iowa and amounts approaching 10 inches just across the border into Minnesota. NWS La Crosse has created a nice summary of this event and explains the meteorology behind why it happened. For today, it will be far southwestern Iowa's turn to get clipped by a winter storm that will mostly stay to the south of Iowa. With it now being the first of March, it is not clear if these two storms constitute March "coming in like a lion or lamb", but it could certainly be a lot worst and even a lot better than the weather for today.

A few weeks ago, a similar map was featured showing how warm mid December through the first week of January had been for much of the contiguous US. So with the meteorological winter months of December through February now complete, today's featured map looks into how warm this winter season was. The map plots average temperature ranks since 1893 with a value of one representing the warmest over that period. There are plenty of ones to be seen over the western half of the US. Iowa is somewhat stuck in the middle, but values shown are above average.

Yesterday, the Storm Prediction Center issued their Day 4 convective outlook and covered much of Iowa with a 15% probability of a severe storm within 25 miles of a given point within the outlook area. It is certainly early in the season for such a risk to include Iowa at four days out as shown by the featured chart presenting the period between the first such risk for Iowa and last risk by year. Only 2022 had an earlier such risk, by one day for 5 March. Unfortunately, you may recall the horrific weather that day with the Winterset EF4 Tornado being the most significant. At the moment, the main tornado threat appears to stay south of Iowa.

The US Drought Monitor will be released later this morning and will likely show continued degradation of analyzed drought over Iowa. The current drought got started late during the 2025 growing season and took a bite out of what should have been exceptional crop yields. The situation has not improved much since and as we quickly approach the 2026 growing season, the impacts of recent dryness are being to be felt. The featured map presents percent of average precipitation totals from IEM tracked long term climate sites in Iowa since the start of August. A number of locations over southeastern Iowa are shown below 50% of average over this period. Hopefully a rainfall event today into Friday will bring much needed precipitation, but some parts of the state will miss out and it will be a number of days before the next significant rainfall arrives.

Thunderstorms rolled into Iowa late Thursday night and will abound today bringing much needed rainfall to the state. Having such storms during the first week of March is nothing too exceptional as shown by the featured chart. The chart presents a heatmap of Des Moines airport weather reports of thunder by week of the year and by hour of the day. The side bar charts present the histograms for each. The chart shows an increase in such activity starting about mid February and roughly increasing each week until peaking in mid June. The chart nicely shows how most of the thunder reports are during the night time hours for central Iowa as activity is often driven by the "low level jet" persisting thunderstorm complexes that develop over the plains and then move east overnight. The early spring and late fall activity shows less of a strong overnight signal as these time periods are more dominated by larger scale low pressure systems that impact the state and more tied to daylight heating driving thunderstorm activity.

The increase in humidity on Friday was remarkable with practically the entire state reaching a dew point temperature of at least 50°F and a considerable portion of the state reaching at least 60°F by late afternoon and into the evening. All of this moisture helped to fuel abundant showers and thunderstorms which brought much needed rainfall to the state. The dew point readings on Friday were at the extreme end of what is possible for this time of year. The featured chart presents the maximum reported dew point by hour for Des Moines over the inclusive 1 January through 6 March period. The plot shows thirteen hours during yesterday with the reported dew point either tied or setting an unofficial hourly record. The reported 61°F dew point at 9 PM also appears to be the overall maximum for any hour during this selected period of days.

The spectacular weather on Sunday continued into Monday with record high temperatures set at a number of locations across Iowa and beyond. The calendar says we are still within the second week of March, so there is plenty of time yet for the chance of winter-like weather. The featured chart looks into an aspect of that by plotting the last cold season date of at least an inch of snow reported for Des Moines. The yearly value is plotted along with a line until the date when snow cover was no longer reported (~ how long the snow stuck around). This combination is colorized by the number of days with red values indicating the shortest duration. The left panel black line plots the accumulated frequency of the last date. The 10 March value is somwhere just below 50%, so over half of the previous years on record reported at least a single one inch snowfall event or larger after 10 March. The right hand plot presents the date by year with two trend lines shown. A number of recent years have seen such snows into mid April and even early May, but these late season events struggle to stick around long as ever warming soils, lengthening days, and increased solar inputs act to quickly melt the snow away.