One of the reasons drought busting during the winter season can be problematic is that soils are often still frozen and received rainfall is more likely to run off than infiltrate the ground. For some parts of the country, the runoff greatly helps as it fills reservoirs. For Iowa, we generally want the water to fill the reservoir that exists in our fertile top soil and thus be used by the next growing season's crop. So with the rainfall event on Tuesday, one wonders how much of it infiltrated as frozen soil still exists over much of the state. The featured chart is from the ISU Soil Moisture station just west of Ames and displays the soil moisture readings from a problem recently buried to a 12 inch depth within the field. It clearly and nicely shows the rain water reaching those levels, but there are caveats if this can be extrapolated to other sites due to this site being recently installed, in a field, in a field without ground cover which should allow for warmer top soils, and perhaps some other quirks allowing rain water to infiltrate. Our other stations nearby are not as convincing that water reached at least twelve inches depth.

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