After only one day with wide spread sub-freezing temperatures during October, November has started off mild as well with the forecast for the first week of month remaining well above freezing for low temperatures. It continues to be remarkable to denote how much warmer low temperatures have been compared with climatology. The featured chart presents a comparison between various daily climatology sources for Ames for November. The tan bars represent simple period of record averages and the three lines show the last three renditions of the official climatology. The "pull" of climatology is obvious with days getting progressively cooler and this "pull" will get harder to fight against if our current mild weather pattern is to continue.

For November, it was rather humid on Monday with dew point readings into the lower 60s for much of Iowa. The featured chart looks into the dew point climatology by wind direction for Des Moines during November. The black line represents the simple average and intuitively shows the highest dew point readings with a southerly wind and lowest when the wind is from the northwest. The observations for yesterday are denoted by the black dots and show values well above the 95th percentile for the south-southeasterly direction. As was the case for much of September, the elevated humidity levels are again fueling significant rainfalls with more on the way lasting into Thursday.

Muggy for November air was again present over the eastern half of Iowa on Tuesday with dew point readings into the lower 60s! The featured chart presents hourly dew point maximum values over the period of record for Cedar Rapids. Plenty of hours with new maximum or tied maximum values are indicated occurring on Tuesday. The overall maximum value of 64°F tied a value from 1 Nov 2000. This is all based on available hourly reports and there is not a daily high and low value reported like for air temperature. The humid air will finally depart the state on Wednesday with temperatures much closer to average than what our recent weather has been.

The IEM curates an archive of one minute interval ASOS data collected by NCEI. The data collection method used by NCEI for this dataset leads to a day or two data availability delay. Anyway, when interesting weather phenomena happen around the country, it is interesting to see what the one minute interval observations show for the event. On Monday, Melbourne Florida set a all-time 24 hour precipitation record of 11.51" for the site. The featured chart shows the one minute interval data from this event with the black line showing the accumulation and the other lines showing computed rainfall rates over various windows of time. The one minute data is not complete, so the plotted total comes up just short of the official total. That aside, it is remarkable to see the maximum one minute accumulation was just 0.03"! If you follow the "heavyrain" feature tag, you'll find many of examples of this plot for significant rainfall events for other locations in the country. Rainfall rates for those events are always much higher.