The weekly update to the US Drought Monitor was just released and much of the analyzed drought over the country was improved, including Iowa. The featured chart presents a time series cartoon of weekly US Drought Monitor classification changes for the contiguous US. The blue areas represent net improvements and red areas degradation. The height represents the amount of area changed by one classification with the unit height being the size of the contiguous US. It is interesting to denote the winter time improvements happening this year that are repeating what happened during the winter last year. For Iowa, January saw significant amounts of precipitation over much of the state and it indeed has helped the drought situation. We still could use more precipitation before the start of the growing season and parts of northern Iowa have been missing out on big events this winter.

Voting:
Good = 9
Bad = 1