Thunderstorms rolled into Iowa late Thursday night and will abound today bringing much needed rainfall to the state. Having such storms during the first week of March is nothing too exceptional as shown by the featured chart. The chart presents a heatmap of Des Moines airport weather reports of thunder by week of the year and by hour of the day. The side bar charts present the histograms for each. The chart shows an increase in such activity starting about mid February and roughly increasing each week until peaking in mid June. The chart nicely shows how most of the thunder reports are during the night time hours for central Iowa as activity is often driven by the "low level jet" persisting thunderstorm complexes that develop over the plains and then move east overnight. The early spring and late fall activity shows less of a strong overnight signal as these time periods are more dominated by larger scale low pressure systems that impact the state and more tied to daylight heating driving thunderstorm activity.

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Tags:   thunder