While 2012 will go down as the warmest year on record for Iowa and places like Des Moines, not every observation point in the state will finish number one. The featured map presents an IEM computed ranking for long term climate sites in the state of this year's average temperature. How can such a difference exist between sites in the state? Long term climate observations are often not made at the same location over the past 100 years. They move between slightly different micro-climates and the landscape around the site changes as well. There also can be small differences in observation equipment or the observation method. All of these issues and more conspire to create these small scale differences.

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