The Storm Prediction Center (SPC) is most widely known for issuing severe thunderstorm and tornado watches along with convective outlooks. SPC also has a fire weather program with associated fire weather outlooks. For Wednesday, SPC had much of Iowa highlighted with a critical fire weather risk due to strong winds, low humidity, and ample dry surface vegetation. The IEM maintains an unofficial archive of these outlooks and a GIS calculation indicates that the Wednesday critical risk covered more of Iowa than any previous such risk since the beginning of the archive in 2006. The featured chart attempts to show how rare these events are by plotting the yearly duration between the first and last such event that spatially overlapped Iowa by at least 5% of Iowa's area. The right hand side panel plots the number of such events per year. If you run this autoplot with a 50% overlap requirement, you will find only four such events over the period of record including yesterday. This was also the first such event during the month of February for Iowa.

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Tags:   fire   2026