IEM Daily Feature
Tuesday, 09 March 2021

Reaching 70+ in March

Posted: 09 Mar 2021 05:35 AM

The forecast for today has very warm temperatures for early March with a high above 70 expected for Des Moines. The featured chart presents the hourly temperature distributions for days during March with a high temperature of at least 70 degrees. The distributions are presented as violin plots with the width of the violin providing an indication of the frequency at that temperature (wider is more frequent). There are many interesting aspects to the plot. First, it appears having cold morning low temperatures mostly precludes such warm afternoon temps. Second, there is a lot of noise in the data with large spreads shown throughout the day. These large ranges are from frontal passages as such anomalously warm temperatures are often associated with a warm air mass streaming north to soon be followed by a cold front passage and cooler temperatures. The vast majority of these warm events happen during the mid afternoon hours and before sunset by ~6 PM.

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