The weekly update to the US Drought Monitor was just released and while there were small improvements made to the analysis over northern Iowa, much of southern Iowa saw a significant degradation. The featured chart presents a smoothed analysis of the week to week changes in areal coverage of analyzed drought over the state since 2010. The areas in blue indicate net decrease in drought coverage and red indicate an increase. The unit magnitude of the plot is the area of Iowa. July and early August are certainly a favored time of year for increasing drought as rainfall events decrease and become more localized. The last few years have seen significant rains show up in late August and September, will the same happen this year? Current forecasts are not very optimistic for the next few weeks of August.

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