September is here and Iowa’s chief weather watcher says August was one of the colder, wetter Augusts the state has seen in several years. State climatologist Harry Hillaker says the just-concluded month was Iowa’s coolest August since 2009. “On the temperature end of things, we were running about two degrees below normal, mainly thanks to a very cool second half of the month,” Hillaker says. “On the rainfall end, as always, there was a lot of variability across the state, but overall the preliminary statewide average was 5.42 inches of rainfall.”

That’s about one-and-a-quarter inches above normal during August. Here in Atlantic, at the KJAN Studios (The official reporting site for Atlantic), we received 3.88 inches of rain in August, which was a little more than one-half inch above normal. The south-central Iowa town of Albia recorded only about one-and-a-half inches of rain during the month, while Randolph, in southwest Iowa, reported more than 13 inches. Monday marked the end of the three-month summer weather reporting period and Hillaker says the summer of 2015 went out on a cool note.

“Temperatures were a little bit cooler than usual, although June and July, neither one were all that far from normal, but no really hot months this year,” he says. In Atlantic, the average High for August was 83 degrees, which was about 3 degrees cooler than normal, while the average Low of 61 was almost 4 degrees below normal.

Fall will arrive on September 23rd, in a little over three weeks. As for the month ahead, Hillaker says September is starting off warmer-than-normal and humid and it may just stay that way. “The (National) Weather Service’s latest 30-day outlook for September is still favoring above-normal rainfall for much of Iowa and really, much of the central part of the country,” Hillaker says, “and on temperatures, the outlook favors above-normal temperatures.” That’s a flip-flop from the original September outlook which was released about 10 days ago.

(Radio Iowa/KJAN Weather data)