State Climatologist Justin Glisansays Iowa and the entire upper midwest saw a warmer July with the average temperature about 77 degrees — or three degrees above average.
“So, with 154 years of records, preliminarily the 25th warmest July on record, with July climatologically the warmest of any month. So that shows you just how warm we were across the state,” he says.
Glisan says July didn’t repeat last year when it was the second wettest on record, but there were some unusually heavy rainfalls. “A few events during the month in which stations picked up six to 12 inches over 24 to 36 hours. We talk about the annual exceedance probability of zero-point-one perent, so something that you wouldn’t see very often at all,” he says.
The overall rainfall story in the state continues to be split. “We’re about four and a half inches on average, and that’s about three tenths of an inch above average. So statewide, we were wetter than normal,” Glisan says. “But if you look across southern and western Iowa, where we see drought conditions expanding, that’s where we see precipitation about two to three inches below average.”
The rain was enough to back up the old saying “it’s not the heat, its the humidity” that makes things uncomfortbale. “The 26th and 27th, we had several stations across the state break their dew point record, so the amount of water vapor available in the air,” he says. “And combined with temperatures in the low 90s, we had heat index values. of 121 degrees in Ames and then 124 degrees also in Ames and then 121 degrees in Burlington.”
The heat and humidity finally broke as the month of July ended.
(Pat Powers, KQWC, Webster City contributed to this story.)