After a very dry January, February was only marginally wetter and did little to improve the worsening drought situation for Iowa. The featured map takes a bit of a deep dive into how a short term drought indicator changed during the month. The map presents the current US Drought Monitor released yesterday. The IEM long term climate sites are each evaluated for their change in 60 day Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) from the start of February to yesterday. The present value is expressed in terms of the drought monitor with a significant caution that there is no simple relationship between this statistical measure and the multi-faceted composite represented by the drought categorization. That was a bit of a mouthful, but consider the values plotted as indicators. The side panels show the individual station changes ranked by their starting SPI values and then associated changes, with the bottom panel counting the number of stations at various change combinations. A busy plot for sure, but the point is little drought busting was done during the month. There are a number of storm chances to start off March, so hopefully our fortunes change soon.

Voting:
Good = 6
Bad = 2