(Radio Iowa) – Forecasters say Iowa will ride another weather rollercoaster this week with high temperatures tomorrow (Tuesday) climbing into the low to mid-90s, but then a cool front will arrive and knock highs by Thursday into the 60s, with lows in the 40s. Meteorologist Darren Clabo, who moderated the regional climate update for the National Weather Service, predicts another warm-up will soon follow with lesser chances of rain.

“Above-average temperatures are really expected over the next one to two weeks, combined with below-average precipitation,” Clabo says. “Kind of expecting more or less an upper level ridge to stick around, which should bring us warmer-than-average and drier-than-average conditions, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing going into the harvest season, folks will be able to get out in the fields.” He says that same pattern may continue right into October.

“There are some pretty strong signals that warmer-than-average conditions will persist over the central part of the United States combined with below-average precipitation,” Clabo says. “October is a drier month so below-average precipitation on a normally average to dryish month to begin with doesn’t bode well for filling stock ponds and allowing our stream flow to increase.”

Clabo says the climate outlooks show the La Nina pattern hanging on into winter, for the third year in a row, which -could- mean a warmer-than-normal winter ahead for Iowa.

(Radio Iowa) – Officials with the U-S Army Corps of Engineers will cut short the navigation season on the Missouri River this fall due to the continued drought. John Remus, chief of the Corps’ Missouri River Basin Water Management Office, says they’ve been conserving water for months. “We restrict our releases from Gavins Point, we start cutting service to navigation,” Remus says. “When that both is a lesser service during the flow support season and then if it gets worse, we will make that flow support season shorter.”

Clear signs of the drought first began to emerge in July of 2020, and Remus says one priority is to keep a reserve of water in the upstream reservoirs. “If it gets real bad, if we reach a certain level of storage in the system, we don’t support navigation at all for that year,” Remus says, “and if we ever reach that, and we never have, we could maintain that lower level of service to all the other purposes, even if we get what we call lower decile run offs which are very, very dry years.”

The Corps has cut back releases, dropping Missouri River levels by a full foot, which will impact boat traffic and could affect municipal water supplies and other utilities that rely on the river. Navigation continues on the Missouri, though barges will have to lighten their loads to float. Remus says the navigation season will end November 28th, which is three days early.

(Radio Iowa) – This is Tractor Safety Day, the first day of National Farm Safety Week, and one of the biggest dangers involving farm tractors is a lack of rollover protection. A program offers Iowa tractor owners a rebate to install rollover protective structures, or ROPS. Jackie Curnick, program coordinator at the University of Iowa’s Environmental Health Sciences Research Center, says the rebate saves money — and rollbars save lives. Curnick says, “We can provide up to $500 in funding for a retrofitted rollbar and typically that’s about half of the price of the retrofit.” The program often has a lengthy national wait list but Curnick says Iowans have a special “in” and should apply for the rebate.

“Iowa is lucky because we do have some funds available, so we do say, ‘Yes get on the list,'” Curnick says. “In the last couple of years we’ve retrofitted about 30 tractors because we have that funding through the Iowa Center for Agricultural Safety and Health.” Studies find ROPS are 99% effective in preventing injury or death in the event of a rollover when used with a seatbelt, and 70% effective when used without a seatbelt.

“Half of U.S. tractors don’t have rollover protection. They are the leading cause of death on a farm, and 80% of deaths caused by tractor rollovers happen to farmers,” Curnick says. “The most frequent cause of them are going from the side or rear turnovers and that’s about 96 deaths per year.” She says virtually any tractor can be retrofitted with a ROPS. Learn more about the rebate program at www.i-cash.org.

Chris Parks and Cass/Adair County Conservation Officer Grant Gelly talk about all things outdoors. This week they discuss fall migration, deer tag sales, youth and archery deer seasons getting started, and much more.

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• KJAN, Atlantic  .03″
• Elk Horn  .06″
• Audubon  .11″
• Oakland  .12″
• Manning  .13″
• Clarinda  .12″
• Corning  .4″

(Radio Iowa) – The chief of Iowa’s Parks, Forests and Preserves Bureau is asking Iowans to mark Saturday, September 24th on their calendars to lend a hand with sprucing up our state parks. It’s the Iowa Department of Natural Resources’ sixth annual Statewide Volunteer Day and Sherry Arntzen is encouraging everyone who loves and uses our park system to sign up. “We have a number of different volunteer projects in some of the parks,” Arntzen says. “It could be putting together picnic tables, painting picnic tables, picking up trash, helping with some invasive species removal, planting trees, or staining other buildings that we have.”

There are projects planned all across the state at about one in every four of Iowa’s state parks. “So we have 71 state parks and forests. Right now, we have 18 parks that have scheduled events on the 24th,” Arntzen says, “but if people are interested in learning about other volunteer opportunities at some of our parks, we encourage them to reach out to the park offices direct.” Arntzen says Iowa’s state parks are “beloved places for many Iowans,” and the D-N-R staff greatly appreciates the help volunteers provide.   “We’re down a little bit this year on the number of scheduled projects especially since COVID,” Arntzen says. “We have a large increase in our number of guests that we serve in our parks, so we have been quite busy this year with just our day-to-day operations.”

Some of the projects can be tackled rain or shine, but if the weather looks inclement, volunteers should contact the individual park office in case of changes to the date, time or meeting location. To sign up, log on to: www.iowadnr.gov/volunteer

(Radio Iowa) – The Iowa company that’s proposing to pipe carbon dioxide from Midwest ethanol plants and store it underground in North Dakota says it’s secured the rights to more than half of the land it needs for its route through Iowa. Summit Carbon Solutions says it’s partnered with 800 Iowa landowners to sign 14-hundred easement agreements. But Jessica Mazour with the Iowa chapter of the Sierra Club says she’s not convinced Summit has the backing it says it does. “Once they’re done filing their list of exhibit H, which is the properties they think they need eminent domain for, then I think we can consider what numbers they’re presenting,” Mazour says.

Environmentalists and many farmers and landowners worry about the safety of the pipelines and impacts to farmland. Don Johansson farms in Cherokee County and is one of the landowners affected by the summit pipeline. He spoke at Tuesday’s Iowa Utilities Board meeting. “One of the things that strikes me with this is when you talk to people, so many people are just totally unaware of it. And I worked the booth at State Fair this year for a day. And the same was true, people would come up and be totally unaware of what these pipelines are.”

He opposes the pipelines because of what he says is the potential danger with a rupture.
The ethanol industry says pipelines will help them lower their emissions and reach more fuel markets. Summit says it’s on track to start constructing the pipeline in late 2023.

(Kaite Piekes, Iowa Public Radio contributed to this story)

w/Kate Olson.

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(Radio Iowa) – Prolonged drought across the region has pushed the U-S Army Corps of Engineers to lower Missouri River levels from Nebraska City to Kansas City by a full foot. The lower levels will affect boat traffic and could impact municipal water supplies and other utilities that rely on the river. Missouri River Basin Water Management Director John Remus (REE-mus) says conditions have been getting worse since the drought first began to emerge in July of 2020. “In March, about 70% of the upper basin was experiencing some level of drought and about 20% of it was severe drought, very, very dry,” Remus says. “We have had some good rains throughout the year up there, but the conditions have improved, but not enough to really help the runoff.”

Remus says lower water levels will have an impact on navigation this fall.  “Of course, that means more trips or more barges to get the same amount of product up and down the river,” Remus says. Navigation continues on the Missouri, though barges will have to lighten their loads to float on the river. The navigation season will end on November 28th, which is three days early. Remus says even prolonged, heavy rains likely wouldn’t make up the difference in low soil moisture levels, as they’ve been so low for so long. “The wild card is really snowpack next year,” he says. “We had next-to-nothing for plains snowpack in 2022, and we had a below-average mountain snowpack. So unless we get better snowpack in the northern part of the basin, we’re probably going to be facing what we’ve seen this year again next year.”

Flows into the Missouri River have been reduced to cope with a much lower flood control pool in the six upstream reservoirs.