October broke a string of drier than normal months, but State Climatologist Harry Hillaker says the wet trend didn’t last long as November turned dry again. “Statewide average precipitation was just a little bit over an inch — 1.7 inches to be exact,” Hillaker says.
“And that’s basically just a little bit better than half of what’s normal for the month of November. And definitely not what we want to be seeing given the dry weather we’ve already had here in 20012.” Hillaker says only a few areas of the state saw better than average precipitation.
“Kind of along a line from south-central up into northeast Iowa,” Hillaker says. But he says the northwest half of the state was especially dry, with some areas seeing only about three-tenths of an inch of rain. The air was drier and warmer in November.
“The month is going to end up being about two-and-a-half degrees warmer than normal, and we’re actually split fairly evenly as far as cooler and warmer than usual days. But the half that were warmer, some of them were way warmer than normal, and so the month as a whole is going to be a little big on the warm side for November, but nothing unusual as far as weather rankings go,” according to Hillaker.
The warmest temperature for the month was 79 degrees on November 10 at Little Sioux in Harrison County while Stanley in Buchanan County hit five degrees for the low on November 27th.
By Pat Powers, KQWC, Webster City