Our brief return to winter weather lasted all of one day and temperatures for Leap Day are back above average to match what has happened for almost the entire month of February. For a number of different metrics, February 2024 will likely come in as warmest on record for much of Iowa. An illustration of how anomalously warm it has been this month is found by the featured chart plotting the frequency distribution of average daily high temperatures for long term climate sites in the state tracked by the IEM. The green solid line represents the non-spatially weighted mean of 33°F and the solid green line represents the 2024 value of 51°F, which makes for an extremely warm departure of about 17 degrees! The teal bars show frequency values at a given temperature with the dashed blue line fitting a normal distribution of the data. The green line being the normal distribution of all previous February data. The 2024 mean (blue line) showing up at the far tail of the period of record distribution is remarkable.

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Tags:   feb24