While temperatures did warm nicely on Sunday, the time at those very nice temperatures was fleeting with a cold front sweeping the state during mid day. The time spent each day near the high temperature is the subject of today's featured chart. Using one minute interval observations from the Des Moines airport since 2000, the chart prevents violin plots by month showing the amount of time spent within three degrees of a given day's high temperature. Violin plots are similar to box and whisker plots, but also attempt to provide more details into the shape of the distribution with fatter sections representing more population density. The black bars within the violins show the inter-quartile range with the white dot representing the mean value. The chart nicely shows the difference between the cool and warm half of the year with ranges during the winter season much larger than during the summer. The reason why is the effectiveness of solar heating, which in the summer nearly always pushes temperatures upward during the day and thus limits the amount of time spent near the high temperature. The winter season is more dominated by air masses and cloudy days can make for limited temperature range during the day, thus increasing the time spent near the high. An additional subtle feature shown is the lack of values over 20 hours during June and July. Again, the reason is the sun as it is extremely difficult to have days during peak solar heating without a diurnal temperature response.

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