July was a wet month, and a state climatologist shares why.

Climatologist Justin Glisan says that thanks to drought conditions that the state faced over several years, the large amount of rain that has been seen so far this year has been extremely helpful, but recently it has caused some issues. He mentions that many may wonder why there wasn’t flooding earlier in the year, and it’s because the rivers and streams were so low, and the ground so dry, that there was a lot of room for the moisture to be absorbed. Once it finally was absorbed though, it had nowhere else to go, and central and northwest Iowa began to see flooding.

Glisan shares a reason for the flooding.

“So, we think of a warming atmosphere, higher temperatures, a lot of overnight low temperatures that we’ve seen daily. Low temperatures that have been broken, given how high the dew point has been. And the dew point basically is the floor in which once the temperature reaches the dew point temperature, dew forms, and you can’t go below that temperature. So it kind of gives us a proxy for overnight low temperatures.”

Glisan explains that when you have higher dew points it puts more moisture in the atmosphere. He adds that when you have these high moisture levels in warmer conditions, you begin to move away from rainfalls that are under an inch of rain, and begin to see heavier rainfalls in the span of 24 hours.