The weather this week has been hot, windy, and low humidity. Combine that with early spring conditions without much yet for greenery and plenty of dead and dry plant materials, you end up with dangerous wind fire conditions. Within the past 10-15 years, the National Weather Service offices covering Iowa have started to more aggressively alert for generous wild fire conditions and one of their available headlines is called a "Red Flag Warning". It is unclear the origin of this term to apply to fire weather, but the association of red being a dangerous color and a flag to fly helps to alert folks outside to take caution. On Wednesday and Thursday, the entire state was simultaneously covered by such an alert for the first time since the statewide inception of this product back in 2014. The featured map presents the areal extent of Red Flag Warnings on Thursday afternoon. We'll have one more day of such hot and dry weather before a return to what we should expect for mid April returns for the weekend and into next week.

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