To date, 3,186 IEM Daily Features have been written. While these features are neat, a long term frustration of mine is that they are almost always an "one-off". This means that the plots were created via some local script that is not available for dynamic plotting on the website. Rewording, you can search and search on the website but rarely find an application that can generate that same chart.

Going forward, I intend to change this practice. You may have noticed little buttons recently appearing underneath the featured chart/map.

Generate This Chart on Website

Clicking this button should take you to an application that generated the featured image and contains options to change the plot to another location or plot other variables.

Not all IEM Daily Features will have this functionality as some plotting scripts take many minutes or hours to run, so they are not conducive to interactive web plotting. The hope is that these will be few and far in-between.

Many times I'll produce a graphic for Des Moines or Ames and folks will instantly wonder what that chart looks like for Waterloo or some other location in the MidWest. This new functionality should help immediately address that need.

As always, please let me know of suggestions.