Yesterday's IEM Daily Feature denoted the dryness that has accumulated over the past month of so for much of Iowa. The impacts of this dryness though were nearly all positive after an extremely wet 2018 and winter season. Today's featured chart attempts to illustrate his dichotomy by plotting the trailing 31, 91, and 365 day precipitation departures for Ames. The current values show a large gap between the short term and long term departure. While the 365 day departure is about 17 inches above average, the near term values are closer to zero or slightly negative. The near term forecast has chances of rain, so perhaps the near term dryness is about to be erased.

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