(Radio Iowa) – Numbers from state climatologist Justin Glisan confirm spring jackets weren’t always the best option in April.  “We’re about five degrees below average looks like the top 15 coldest April on record in our records go back 150 years,” Glisan says. The state climatologist says he also got a lot of comments about how windy the days were in the just completed month.

“Now April is climatologically the windiest month of the year for Iowa — but really windy conditions — we had you know strings of days in which sustained winds were 20 to 25 miles per hour and gusting up into the 30s,” Glisan says. “So we look at the averages, the climatology of wind speed and direction. We had a significant wind direction out of the northwest but also a secondary southeasterly component to that. And those are driven by wetter days from the northwest and then warmer days from the southeast.”

Those wind conditions help create some stormy weather throughout April. Glisan says the positive from the storms is they brought more precipitation with them. “We look at April last year, we were an inch and a half below average. So relatively dry conditions last April,” according to Glisan. “We were only about four-tenths of an inch below average across the state. And we had pockets in central in north-central Iowa, where we had rainfall departures — positive so surpluses of anywhere from one to two inches.”

The statewide average for precipitation was three-point-two inches. Glisan says the early projections are for May to remain cool and damp. Check out the April weather data for Atlantic in a report on the Weather page at kjan.com (Located under the Community Hub column).