The recent spate of wet weather that’s stormed over Iowa is very similar to what happened 15 years ago. Iowa State University meteorology professor Bill Gallus has reviewed the data.
"In many ways, the pattern we’ve had the last two or three weeks is very similar to what lasted for a much longer time in 1993," Gallus says.
Gallus predicts there soon will be a shift in this year’s weather pattern, however. "It might not be a drastic shift, but it appears by Friday or Saturday of this week the weather pattern’s going to change slightly," Gallus says. "…We still may have thunderstorms around from time to time, but we probably will have longer periods of dry weather in between them."
Iowa State University meteorologist Bill Gutowski says so-called "climate change" might be a part of this weather equation, but it’s too soon to say. "There are physical reasons as well as results from models that indicate that we could expect more intense rainfall events occurring in a much warmer climate, but it’d be really hard to say based on what’s going on this year that this is directly an outcome of global warming," Gutowski says. "We would need to see that the…frequency of those events is increasing."
According to Gutowski, one of the challenges researchers face is there are "natural fluctuations" in the climate system, so weather data from a single year is just not indicative of any trend.