Automated Data Plotter

This application dynamically generates many types of graphs. These graphs are derived from processing of various data sources done by the IEM. Please feel free to use these generated graphics in whatever way you wish. Reset App. The IEM Explorer application offers a simplified frontend to some of these autoplots.


First, select a chart type::

Second, select specific chart options::

Application Mode:
Select State:
Retroactive Date of Plot
(YYYY/mm/dd)
Over how many trailing days to compute the metric?
Over how many trailing days to compute the metric?
Over how many trailing days to compute the metric?
Image Pixel Size @100 DPI
Image Resolution (DPI) (50 to 500)
Select Output Format:

Plot Description:

This visualization mashes up the US Drought Monitor and three trailing day standardized precipitation index of your choice within a map presentation for a single state. SPI is computed by the simple formula of (accum - climatology) / standard deviation.

This autoplot is extremely slow to generate due to the on-the-fly calculation of standard deviation. As such, an optimization is done to sub-sample from available stations since the resulting map can only display a certain number of data points legibly. This means that the dataset you download from this page does not contain all available stations for a given state :/

Based on a sampling of recent timings for this application, plot generation time has averaged 62 seconds. Hold on for the plot is generating now!


View Data (as csv)   Download as Excel  
If you notice plotting issues with the image above, please do let us know by providing the URL address currently shown by your web browser.

IEM Daily Features using this plot

The IEM Daily Features found on this website often utilize plots found on this application. Here is a listing of features referencing this plot type.