For the year to date period, one of the driest locations in the state is the Des Moines Airport. The featured chart looks into the uniqueness of having Des Moines this relatively dry compared with the rest of the state. The top panel presents the yearly precipitation percentile for the location vs all other reporting locations in the state for the given year. The bottom panel shows the bias vs a simple mean value against those same stations. Interestingly, the mean percentile and bias value are very close to the middle of both distributions. Rewording, the geographically center location of Des Moines within Iowa also puts it in the middle of range of precipitation over the state. Indeed, without any notable topographic features, the precipitation climatology is rather smoothly oriented in a SE to NW orientation. The right hand side shows the top 10 and bottom 10 percentile ranks. So the 2024 year to date total ranks lowest vs all other previous full calendar year totals. So it would seem Des Moines is due for a few big storms to even things out against other sites for the year!

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