The folks at the European Centre for Medium Range Weather are producing many innovate products and services. One such product is the ERA5 Land dataset, which is a high resolution hourly reanalysis of many atmospheric variables dating back to 1950 (perhaps soon to 1940). One of the variables is shortwave / solar radiation and the IEM has recently completed a process to provide these solar radiation estimates along side the long term climate data. The featured chart presents this data expressed as a daily average flux value (megajoules per day) for Ames for the date period between 1 May and 31 August. It is somewhat wild to denote the the recent drought years of 1988 and 2012 coming in at the top of the most radiation list and 1993 plus 1982 at the bottom of least radiation. It is difficult to have observations to compare against these analyses, but they intuitively make sense as flood years are cloudier than drought years. It also gives some credibility to the dataset that folks over in Europe may have gotten the data right in Iowa! More tools and other ERA5 Land variables will be appearing on the IEM website with time!

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