It certainly felt like summer in Iowa over the weekend with heat index values reaching the triple digits for much of the state. The featured chart is an attempt at computing a climatology for daily maximum feels like temperature (combination of wind chill and heat index). An immediate caveat is that during the cold season, this metric isn't all that intuitive as it represents the warmest daily wind chill and not the coldest. That aside, the plot is based on period of record hourly or better observations from Des Moines with the present day heat index and wind chill equations applied to the archive. The top panel shows a smoothed presentation of the climatology with the blue dots representing the 2024 observations. Since the climatology is smoothed over seven days, the observations can sometimes appear outside of the bounds. The bottom panel shows the daily frequency of having a maximum heat index of at least 100 degrees. The middle of July is certainly the peak time of year for such hot conditions. We'll have another such day on Monday before cooler weather arrives for the rest of the week.

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