Very warm early April air temperatures, sunshine, and generally dry conditions have allowed soil temperatures to rapidly warm to daily average values around 60 degrees. This warm has some folks ignoring the calendar and planting various things in the ground well earlier than in a typical year. The featured chart presents yearly time series of daily average four inch depth soil temperature from the ISU AEA Farm station west of Ames. The data for 2021 is shown by the red line with all previous years on record in blue and a simple average shown in black. The current temperature is something more typical for early May and the range of values show plenty of time to have chilly average soil temperatures below 50 degrees.

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Tags:   soiltemp