Damage to a home in Seymour from a tornado March 6th.

Iowa’s weather for March was one of clouds, rain, snow,warmth and some severe storms. State climatologist Harry Hillaker said the month continued a trend of being warmer.

He says the month will average around one degree above normal, with a lot of extreme temperatures in the first half of the month and slightly above normal in the second half, despite a lot of cloudy days. Hillaker says both ends of the thermometer got some action.

“Lowest temperature we had for the month — got down to minus 9 degrees on the morning of the 15th in Stanley in Buchanan County in northeast Iowa,” Hillaker says. “And just four days later it got up to 84 degrees in Sydney in the far southwest corner of the state.”

Hillaker says that was the second day we had temperatures in the 80s. The other was on March 6th, which he says is pretty early in the month for temperatures to climb that high. The month was just slightly wetter than normal.

He says the one change was the southern part of the state got much more rain, where it was needed to help the drought situation. “For the state as a whole, roughly two-point-six inches of rain for the month. About a third of an inch more than what is typical for March,” according to Hillaker. The snowfall total didn’t set any overall records.

Hillaker says we had around five inches of snow on average, which is typical. There was one big snowfall on the 12th and 13th where the northern part of the state got hit hard — and that followed the pattern of this winter. Hillaker says it looks like March will end up being the 9th wettest on record.

(Reporting by Pat Powers, KQWC, Webster City)