The Iowa Environmental Mesonet (IEM) collects environmental data from cooperating members with observing networks. The data are stored and made available on this website.

IEM Daily Feature

April Flight Rules

Posted: 01 May 2026 05:30 AM, Views: 1164
The start of a new month is always a good time to review what happened for the previous month. The featured chart reviews hourly aviation flight rules computed from the Des Moines airport weather station. These rules consider cloud ceilings and horizontal visibility among other things to restrict aviation traffic. The featured chart only considers the weather station horizontal visibility distance and vertical distance to cloud coverage either in "broken" or "overcast" state. The chart is a nice first guess to indicate periods where there was likely poor flying weather conditions due to visibility reductions. The stormy start to April is most noticeable with reductions more isolated after the first few days.
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Previous Years' Features
Fayette, IA Webcam:
News Items  

1 April IEM Outage [resolved]
Posted: 2 Apr 10:55 AM

Tracking TAF Amendments
Posted: 13 Feb 10:28 AM

IEM Archival Update
Posted: 24 Sep 11:07 PM

TAF Archive Fixes
Posted: 22 Aug 7:28 AM

Website Update
Posted: 13 Jun 12:45 PM

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Soil Temperatures

Data from the Iowa State Soil Moisture Network is found on this website and daily soil temperature averages are used to produce the highlighted analysis.

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The IEM combines data from participating networks into products like maps shown above and web applications to analyze the data.

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