Iowa Environmental Mesonet

Iowa State University Department of Agronomy

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Past IEM Features tagged: coldfront

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Deteoriate, improve, deteoriate, improve

13 Jan 2009 05:09 AM
The featured graph is a time series from the Spencer airport sensor showing air temps, wind speeds, and visibility distance. The morning hours saw a round of snowfall followed by improving conditions where temperatures rose to above freezing in many locations followed by a frontal passage with rapidly deteoriating conditions followed by a decrease in wind speeds with improving visibilities by bitterly cold temperatures. All of that makes for quite the weather day! The next winter storm will be here this evening already!

Voting:
Good = 23
Bad = 6

Tags:   coldfront  



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80 degrees in 12 hours

16 Dec 2008 06:15 AM
The cold front passage on Sunday was one for the record books due to the drastic and rapid change in temperature. Today's featured plot is a time series from Ottumwa showing an amazing drop of 80 degrees in 12 hours. Note this is a drop from an air temperature of 60 to a wind chill value of -20. The actual air temperature drop was around 60 degrees in just 12 hours! Some analysis is currently being done to compare this drop to others in the past, stay tuned.

Voting:
Good = 33
Bad = 16

Tags:   coldfront   extreme  



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Note the stair step nature of the temperature plot is due to the 1 degree precision of observations

Strong cold front

15 Dec 2008 06:14 AM
A very intense cold front crossed the state on Sunday dropping our temperatures from the 40s and 50s almost immediately to values below freezing. The featured graph is a timeseries from the Corning SchoolNet site with observations shown every 6 seconds for a period of only 15 minutes! The rapid wind shift and initial temperature drop take place within a minute. Temperatures continued dropping for the rest of the day on Sunday and now are below zero for many locations in Iowa.

Voting:
Good = 36
Bad = 7

Tags:   coldfront  



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What a difference 24 hours makes

30 Jan 2008 07:50 AM
The featured chart is of air temperatures from the Des Moines airport from Monday evening to Tuesday evening. You can see the precipitous 50 degree drop in temperature over just 24 hours. Today will be another very cold day with highs around 10 with more chances of snow beginning this evening and lasting into the weekend. Our brutal winter continues!

Voting:
Good = 23
Bad = 2

Tags:   coldfront