Weathered Questions 5.8

So our first question here kind of covers some recent storms that hit the Eastern Iowa area.

So Eastern Iowa listener asking, How did all of this heavy rain happen, but it was never super, super hot? That one in reference, I think, to the most recent kind of weekend storms that led us into the weekend at least.

Guy? Yeah, that one is probably referencing Friday into Saturday morning.

with how many episodes of rain that came through.

Very humid in the area, but it never really got hot.

And that seems to be kind of a common misnomer here.

We didn't really have any severe weather.

That's the one big difference.

It can absolutely rain at any temperature above 32.

It can actually rain below 32, but that's for a different episode.

We'll save that one.

Yeah, the higher the dew point is in our atmosphere, which is literally an absolute measure of moisture content, the more moisture that's literally present.

And if you were to take that air on a given day and just heat it up from the sun and let it sit there, you're going to at least probably, depending on the upper level temperatures, get at least some clouds to form.

But when you have a system like we had Friday into early Saturday, a low pressure system come through and actually lift that air up, it doesn't really matter what your temperature is down near the ground because the air is getting lifted in that case.

And it lifts up, it condenses out.

For anybody in Eastern Iowa who was around Friday into early Saturday and saw the rain come through, the clouds were extremely low on that day, which is an indication that the humidity is very high.

And as a result, it didn't take much at all to squeeze all the moisture out that we could.

And that low continued spiraling through Friday night to early Saturday and temperatures fell in the 60s, yet heavy rain continued.

The bottom line is, as long as the mechanism is there, which in this case was an actual low pressure system, You know, it can squeeze on the atmosphere all day and all night, just keep bringing moisture to it.

So that's the key difference there.

This wasn't a heat driven situation.

This was a mechanically driven situation in the atmosphere.

So good question, though.

Good question, because we hear about this a lot.

We do.