Past Features

This page lists out the IEM Daily Features for a month at a time. Features have been posted on most days since February 2002. List all feature titles.

Mon Jun 01, 2026

Daily Precip Climo

On average, June is Iowa's wettest month. So it seems appropriate for the start of June to look into precipitation climatology. The featured chart presents the official NCEI daily climatology for Des Moines along with the previous official version. NCEI updates the climatology every ten years to represent a recent 30 year period. A climatology of precipitation is somewhat tricky as the dataset is dominated by dry days (zeros) and heavy rainfall events that skew simple daily statistics. Average daily values become somewhat meaningless, but the annual cycle is still illustrative as shown by the featured chart. It is interesting to see the July dip that shows up in the current (1991-2020) climatology, which is likely due to a number of dry Julys during the 2010s.

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