IEM Daily Feature
Wednesday, 14 July 2021

July Dew Point Distributions

Posted: 14 Jul 2021 05:40 AM

Yesterday's IEM Daily Feature denoted the lack of extremely muggy dew point temperatures so far this year. Today's featured chart presents this data in a different fashion with each year's hourly observations during July for Des Moines since 2000 presented as violin plots. This plot type illustrates the frequency distribution with the widest portions indicating the highest populations at approximately the given temperature as some smoothing is done. The width of the violins between each of the years is not directly comparable as each year's maximum width is relative to that year's data. Anyway, these plots nicely allow qualitative comparisons between the years whereas lots of information is often lost just plotting the average value. The three ticks with each of the violins denote the range and average value. So the right most violin is 2021 and the tight range with nothing toward either extreme is interesting while comparing against the previous years. July 2021 still has over half of the month to go, so its shape will certainly change, but the near term forecast continues to lack anything extreme for dew points.

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