Year will end as one of the warmest

Flurries may be flying, but there’s still plenty of talk about how warm this last year of the ’90s has been. The National Climatic Data Center announced Monday this’ll go down as the second warmest year in U-S history. As for Iowa, we’ve had several warm spells, but state climatologist Harry Hillaker says 1999 wasn’t that momentous. He predicts it’ll only be the 18th warmest year for Iowa, compared to 1931, the warmest year on record at an average of 53 degrees.Hillaker says Iowa did have a warmer-than-usual February and July and a very dry autumn, but it wasn’t enough to tip the weather scales very far for the full year.The average temperature for this year should come out around 50 degrees.