The IEM has recently been working on wrangling a new dataset based on the weekly Iowa crop reporting districts reports found here. These reports contain an estimate of the number of days over the past week that were suitable for fieldwork. With data back to 1974, but with some limited holes, the featured chart attempts to reproduce the climatology of this value by day of the year. The weekly values are evenly weighted to a daily probability and then averaged over the period of record. The resulting chart looks awesome and nicely illustrates some aspects of the difficulties of agriculture in Iowa. The most important time of year to be in the field is to plant and the months of April and May have the lowest frequencies found over the growing season! The highest frequencies are found over the second half of the growing season when rainfall events decrease in frequency and spatial extent vs spring. The plotted colors were selected to highlight north to south differences with the northern tier clearly lagging in April, but then an interesting lag over southern Iowa is found during May. The dip in frequencies over the end of May may be more explained by data collection difficulties during the Memorial Day holiday weekend than a physical process ongoing in the state. The IEM website doesn't have much to offer with this dataset yet, but a general landing page is available and tooling will come with time.

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Tags:   nass   suitable   fieldwork