The continued lengthening of daylight time and warmer temperatures certainly have many Iowans thinking about spring. We are already two months removed from the shortest daylight day of the year and the associated change in radiation is the subject of today's daily feature. The chart presents a daily solar radiation climatology for Ames based on ERA5-Land along with 2025 obs based on the same and supplemented by near real-time NCEP HRRR model data. The side panels are diagnostics between the various available sources that the IEM merges with daily COOP data for download. Note that some of these sources have yet to have 2025 data, so thus why they are blank. Anyway, the point of the chart is to show that recent daily solar radiation values around 15 megajoules are roughly double of what climatology shows to start off January. This increase in energy certainly helps to bring spring time to the state.

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