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Monthly Rain Hours

15 Sep 2026 05:30 AM
Monday saw a number of rounds of rainfall to start off what looks to be a very wet week. The featured chart looks into the number of distinct hours per month with the automated weather station reporting some form of rain (RA METAR code). Note that this is not exactly a total number of hours with rain as individual reports cover a shorter duration of time than one hour. The chart is still quite informative and tells an interesting climatology story for Iowa. The blue bars are simple averages since 1973 (the modern observation era). It is interesting to see July with the lowest average among the months stretching from March through October. The reason is that storms are much less organized and more isolated than other months, so while they do produce significant rainfall totals, the overall duration decreases vs larger scale precipitation events. The 2026 observed values are shown by the red bars and the September total is well on its way to finish above average with half of the month yet to go.

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