IEM Daily Bulletin for Feb 19 2026

[daryl herzmann]

Iowa Environmental Mesonet Daily Bulletin for 19 February 2026

News

No news is good news

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Daily Feature

30/90/120 Day SPIs
Date: 18 Feb 05:30 AM
Votes: Good: 9   Bad: 0 Abstain: 0

While it is climatologically the driest time of the year, precipitation events have been difficult to come by and the drought situation for Iowa is not improving. The featured map presents the combination of Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) for some of the long term climate sites within the state along with the most recent US Drought Monitor analysis. Each station plotted has three dots representing the SPI value evaluated over three different trailing number of days. The cartoon in the upper right of the image provides a legend for these three values. The dots are colorized by the SPI value converted to a drought category via the table found on the Drought Monitor website. The gree, blue, and purple colors are just the above average inverse of the drought categories. There is not much to be found on the map for above average values with the lower left dot (120 days) starting to show "D1" level indicators over much of southeastern Iowa. While the aforementioned table provides indicators for drought, a single SPI value does not automatically equate into an analyzed drought category. Other metrics are considered such as surface water state (river flows, lake levels, etc) and evaporative demand. Another sign that things are not in a good state at the moment is the issuance of a number of Fire Weather Warnings for today by the NWS, which considers how dry the ground surface is due to the lack of recent precipitation events.

The featured media can be generated on-demand here

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NWS Watch/Warning Summary for 12 AM 18 Feb 2026 - 12 AM 19 Feb 2026 CST

	Summary		By WFO					Watches
Type	US	IA	ARX	DVN	DMX	OAX	FSD	US
Tornado	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
Svr Tstorm	9	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
Flash Flood	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	---

ARX = LaCrosse, WI DVN = Davenport, IA DMX = Des Moines, IA OAX = Omaha, NE FSD = Sioux Falls, SD

IEM Cow Report

SVR+TOR Warnings Issued:   9 Verified:   7 [77.8%]
Polygon Size Versus County Size            [10.3%]
Average Perimeter Ratio                    [23.6%]
Percentage of Warned Area Verified (15km)  [34.5%]
Average Storm Based Warning Size           [2599 sq km]
Probability of Detection(higher is better) [0.71]
False Alarm Ratio (lower is better)        [0.22]
Critical Success Index (higher is better)  [0.59]