The IEM website attempts to curate datasets useful to support sponsored research and make those products readily available. Today's featured chart highlights a recently added dataset and how it tells a very interesting story leading into this growing season. Some backstory first, the recent years have seen a proliferation of high spatial and temporal resolution "reanalysis" datasets that contain many variables that are difficult to find long term observation archives of. One of the most popular reanalyses is known as ECMWF Reanalysis v5 (ERA5) and recently a down-scaled variant called ERA5-Land was released with hourly data back to 1950! The IEM has processed a few of the variables made available from ERA5-Land and done grid point samples to combined these with the long-term daily climate sites over the contiguous US. The featured chart presents the 0 to 1 meter depth volumetric soil moisture for a grid cell including Ames. The tan area represents the range of daily values since 1950, with the green area showing the width of one standard deviation, the red line being the simple average, and black line the 2024 values. There is a 5 day delay for ERA5-Land data availability, but the 2024 value nicely shows how much water the model says made it from our recent rainfall and snow melt events. This analysis indicates our current soil moisture state near average. This website will be building out more tools and options that include this dataset, so your feedback is certainly welcome!

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Tags:   era5land