For early risers Thursday morning, you may have noticed some interesting weather around central Iowa with a rapid warm up just before sunrise. The featured chart presents one minute observations from the ISU Soil Moisture station just west of Ames between 4 and 7 AM. Of immediate notice is the jump in temperature from about 41°F to 55°F about thirty minutes later. A couple of things were happening at the time to explain this rapid temperature change. First, a frontal passage happened with chinook winds behind the front. The bottom panel nicely shows the wind shift to just north of west, which is a favored direction for such events. The second thing happening was very warm air just above the surface, which was being forced downward by stray shower activity. Perhaps some would say this was a heat burst type event, but it wasn't the only thing driving the rapid temperature change.

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