The weekly update to the US Drought Monitor is due out later this morning and while heavy rains and cool weather over the past week have helped the drought situation, we still have a long ways to go and crops that will need more water to complete the growing season. An illustration of the ongoing drought can be found by totaling up the number of hours each month with measurable precipitation reported as per the Des Moines Airport weather station. The blue bars are the 2023 totals and red bars are a simple long term average. The most recent maximum value is denoted by the green dot. Des Moines is going on five months in a row with below average hours of precipitation. It is kind of interesting to see some of the bell-weather years for precipitation show up on this chart, including July 1993, which was 30 years ago!

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