(Radio Iowa) – We could be looking at a lot of flowers in May as state climatologist Justin Glisan says we had a record amount of April showers. They put the month in the top ten for precipitation. “Five-point-six-six inches preliminarily is the statewide average, which is almost two inches above normal, which preliminarily will give us the sixth wettest April, again with 154 years of records,” Glisan says.
He says April was also warmer, with the statewide average temperature just above 52 degrees. “So that’s about three-point-seven (3.7) degrees above normal, near the 25th warmest April,” he says. Glisan says the conditions were the perfect recipe for more storms. )”With those warmer temperatures and a lot of moisture to work with, we had six days in which we had widespread severe weather,” Glisan says. “So we had numerous spotted tornadoes, officially right now 24 tornadoes reported in April. We had 69 severe straight line wind reports and then 130 severe hail reports as well from the Storm Prediction Center.”
Glisan says we don’t normally see that many twisters in April. “Climatologically, we expect about six tornadoes in April. So again, 24, well above the average. Year to date, we had three tornadoes in March, so we’re at 27 tornadoes so far,” he says. There were not confirmed tornadoes last May, which was the first time that happened since 2013. Glisan says the storms and the rains they brought were welcome in many areas of the state.
“We did significantly clear up the U-S Drought Monitor depiction, so we do have a little bit of drought left in the northwest corner, but we really, with the amount of rainfall that we saw across the drought regions, particularly southern Iowa and parts of northwestern Iowa, we have rebounded significantly,” Glisan says.
May is historically the second wettest month in Iowa behind June, but Glisan says the early outlook shows things being a little cooler and drier.
