IEM Daily Feature
Tuesday, 19 April 2016

Rain Shield

Posted: 19 Apr 2016 05:34 AM

Iowa's glorious most recent weekend was thanks to a strong high pressure system to our east that kept storms over the High Plains at bay. The featured chart displays NOAA MRMS precipitation estimates from Friday through Monday morning. The top panel is a simple map of precipitation totals showing the heavy amounts over Nebraska and South Dakota. The bottom panel is a Hovmoller diagram showing a time series of meridional averaged hourly precipitation over the domain shown in the top panel. This type of plot has some neat attributes as it shows the east/west progression of storms with time and with the east/west domain of Iowa shown, you can see how the areas of precipitation struggled to move east with time. Rain eventually did make into Iowa on Monday with totals mostly below an inch.

Voting:
Good = 10
Bad = 0

Tags:   hovmoller