State Climatologist Dr. Justin Glisan

Kay Henderson

It was a hot and wet summer overall. We'll talk about that impact and more about Iowa's changing weather patterns with state climatologist Dr. Justin Glisan on this edition of Iowa Press.

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For decades, Iowa Press has brought you political leaders and newsmakers from across Iowa and beyond. Celebrating more than 50 years on statewide Iowa PBS, this is the Friday, September 26th edition of Iowa Press. Here is Kay Henderson.

Kay Henderson

Fall. The trees. The leaves are changing. The weather is crisp and cool. Maybe not so much. Our guest today can tell us why. Maybe. It's state climatologist Justin Glisan. He's been with us before. He holds degrees in meteorology and atmospheric sciences. He worked as a research atmospheric scientist at Iowa State University before becoming the state climatologist in 2018. Welcome back.

Justin Glisan

Always a pleasure to be here.

Kay Henderson

Joining our conversation is Erin Murphy of The Gazette in Cedar Rapids.

Erin Murphy

Justin, before we get to where the heck is Autumn? Actually wanted to ask you about the State Drought Monitor, which obviously monitors drought levels throughout the state. Right now, it actually looks pretty good. Just a few mildly concerning spots in southeast and south central Iowa. Why have those areas persisted in drought when the rest of the state is completely clear?

Justin Glisan

Yeah. So you have to think about we've been in a four year drought from 2020 to 2024. So precipitation deficits really stacked up over those four years. Longest drought since the 50s. So if you look at stations across the state, many of them have missed out on at least a year's worth of rainfall. So when you get into dry conditions, those longer term precipitation deficits do reemerge. So the drier pockets of the state is that's where you're seeing that D-0 category reemerge. We have seen some improvement over the last week. But we've been dry over the recent few weeks.

Erin Murphy

And you mentioned that long term. Have there been any lingering effects maybe especially in agriculture from that long term drought?

Justin Glisan

I will say that with the second wettest July on record, 153 years of records coming into the growing season, drier, drier soil profiles, lower stream flows staved off widespread potential flooding. So we did resupply soil moisture profiles, particularly in late June and July. Then we dried out. But really, the crop was already done. Didn't really need any more moisture. So drying out in August wasn't such a bad thing. But being wet, we did see a lot of fungal reemergence of southern rust across the state, and this was because of anomalous flow from the Gulf of Mexico with northerly flow in July. We don't normally see southern rust in the Corn Belt. So it's been a particularly interesting thing to look at.

Kay Henderson

And does that stick around over the winter?

Justin Glisan

It does not. It does not overwinter. So next growing season will start with a clear slate.

Kay Henderson

It appears when you look at the drought map nationwide that things look dry again. What's going on nationally, and how does that impact particularly Western Iowa, since things tend to seem to move that way across our state?

Justin Glisan

Yeah. If you look west of the Continental divide, the map looks ugly. D-3, D-4 conditions, particularly in the monsoon region and the desert southwest. We've had a more active Atlantic season. The Bermuda High has shifted a little further east, and this pulls the moisture transport off of the Midwest towards the eastern seaboard. That's where we've seen a lot of rainfall, a lot of precipitation, a very active severe weather season across the southern states. The upper Midwest, we've been wet in summer, the sixth wettest on record for Iowa, but generally we've been dry over the last six years. If you look at precipitation totals and it's just a part of the large scale planetary flow. It's favoring specific parts of the globe. The haves and the have nots. And, you know, lots of parts of the United States have missed out on rainfall.

Kay Henderson

Let's talk about sort of going back to the spring tornado season. Really didn't materialize.

Justin Glisan

Thankfully, after the most active tornado season for the state of Iowa last year, over 130 tornadoes reported. We're only about 37 now, 37 if you're hit by a tornado, it's impactful. But the flow that we've been in, if you think about summer, it didn't seem really windy and we didn't have a lot of steering flow out there. So thunderstorms pop up, rain out, we get lots of rain over specific parts of the state. Drought monitor clears up, but overall, the severe weather season has been quashed. We've had one derecho. If you go back to 2020, the August 10th derecho, we've had six since then. You'd have to go back to 2013 for another derecho. So ebb and flow of those of those events. But we've been thankfully on a low point in severe weather. But we've got we've gotten rainfall. So we've really helped drought conditions. And I'll take this as opposed to the severe weather season last year.

Kay Henderson

Every Monday we see a report from the USDA that includes information from you about the climate, and it notes subsoil moisture levels. And that's important to read heading into the next growing season. And the fall is really a critical time. So what are you seeing in terms of subsoil moisture?

Justin Glisan

You look at eastern Iowa near normal subsoil moisture. So think down to 80 inches where the problem is starting to crop up is western Iowa and parts of southern Iowa. So if you take 100 years of information, you look at various soil moisture, remote sensed products and modeling tools. That's where we're seeing the driest conditions. And if the outlooks do hold, they are showing warmer conditions. That's where you can start to see evaporation of surface moisture. That's when you can start to see topsoil moisture really extract it. So when you're extracting moisture from the profile and you stay dry, as we enter the driest part of the year, this could be a problem as we move into next growing season. But we still have a lot of time to replenish soil moisture profiles.

Kay Henderson

So when you look at that drought map, there's a zone kind of in southwest Iowa, and there's a zone rather in southeast Iowa. Is it because they're dry that they're not getting rain?

Justin Glisan

Yes. And you look at if you look at the iterations of the Drought Monitor depiction every week. If you go back several weeks, those are the pockets where you see d-one conditions existing through winter into early spring. Then we started to get wet as we enter early summer. But again, you go back to those precipitation deficits. The longer term precipitation deficits reemerge. You think of aquifers, you think of stream flows. All of these go into drought monitoring. If you stay warm and dry and you don't get rainfall, that's where you start to see problems on the drought map.

Erin Murphy

Well, speaking of the subsoil and what it could the impact it could have on next spring. You said we've got some time in the interim. Do we know talking about outlooks and models of what the winter is going to look like?

Justin Glisan

We have an idea of what fall is going to look like in some semblance of what the potential is for winter. We're looking at a potential for a weak La Nina in meteorological fall. September, October, November. And if you go back to analog years in which we've had a weak La Nina, which is colder sea surface temperatures in the eastern equatorial Pacific, impacts where the storm track sets up over the United States. Generally, the corn Belt is warmer and drier September, October, November. Now, if that La Nina does hang around into winter time, if you look again at analog years, we actually should see more snowfall. Now we've had three La Nina winters from 2020 through 2022, where we saw less snowfall. So it doesn't always hew to what we've seen thematically with El Nino or La Nina conditions. But we'll have a better idea given the behavior through the end of September, early October, soil moisture, precipitation, of what we can expect moving into winter.

Kay Henderson

I'm wondering, as a weather person, if you're concerned in the new environment in which most everybody gets their information from a phone about weather alerts. I mean, you need a tornado warning if one is coming. What's the discussion among the weather community about this?

Justin Glisan

So messaging is very important. Lead time. We think of the Greenfield EF-4 tornado. And we've discussed this on a previous episode, 40 minutes of lead time. The National Weather Service does an excellent job once the models pin down a supercell that has a tornadic possibility. But we think of budget cuts. We think of cuts to the National Weather Service. It's hard to get those warnings out when we're not fully staffed. Luckily, the severe weather season hasn't been as devastating as last severe weather season, at least for Iowa. But pushing out those notifications on smartphones, not everybody has a smartphone. So that's why it's important to have multiple avenues of getting those notifications. Smartphones, weather radios, TV, even your radio in your car. So having multiple avenues of getting these notifications is very important because the extremes are becoming more extreme. And we can expect that as we move through the next few decades.

Kay Henderson

As a radio person, I like the radio in the car mention. Looking at some of the insurance companies around the country, and even in Iowa, they are saying, you know, we're not going to renew your homeowner's insurance unless you cut down some trees. So that's because of the derecho?

Justin Glisan

Partially. And all the wind events that we've had since. You know, we've had we've had large hail events. We had again last year, numerous tornadic events. Six derechos, as I mentioned. I speak to insurance groups a lot. Probably the top of my list of groups that I speak to. And those wind events are becoming more frequent. It looks like if you look at the 20 to 30 year trend, and if you look at the climate modeling out over the next few decades, the environment that can support straight line wind events seems to increase, particularly in that April, May, June time frame. So I think the insurance companies are seeing the writing on the wall. They're looking at the science and the climate modeling that is used to look at severe weather events, and we're seeing an increase. And they're taking note of that, as you mentioned.

Erin Murphy

We talk a lot about water quality and the impact that pollution has. What impact, what role does weather, can weather play in water quality?

Justin Glisan

Weather is a big a big driver of water quality. You think of the flush events, longevity droughts, the application of nitrogen for corn and beans. If you don't have any water to activate that at root level, it stays in the soil profile. Four years of drought. We had a massive flush event in 2024. The ninth wettest start through June. And that's where we see those flush events. So after droughts you get into particularly wet patterns, flushes that nitrate out and that's where you get into water quality issues. Now luckily with the second wettest July on record, we were able to put a lot of moisture out into the streams and into the rivers and help dilute the amounts of nitrate that were in the water. But the waterworks, again, was having problems keeping up with those nitrate levels. The amount of thunderstorms that we had in late June and July did help dilute that water. But looking at the extremes, the dry extremes and the wet extremes, they're becoming co-located. They're going to occur more often as we move over the next several decades. So these flush events are going to stick with us. And weather is a very big driver of that.

Erin Murphy

And what options do government leaders have to, you know, mitigate that kind of thing?

Justin Glisan

Yeah. So being at the Department of Agriculture, I learn a lot about the edge of field practices that we can do. Also cover crops, no till practices. Keeping the soil where it is, number one. It's some of the richest soils on Earth. But also the fertilizer that we put into it. We want to keep it there to produce increase productivity in corn and beans. But it also promotes soil health, carbon sequestration. So those practices, along with saturated buffers and bioreactors upstream of urban areas, help remove those nitrates. And I think we've really seen a very big increase in interest, but also the putting this technology to work now with the amount of farmland that we have in Iowa, we it's hard to keep up with that. But I think we're trying to address those issues. And I think we're doing a pretty good job, given the science that we're seeing in the trends with Iowa State. But also what the expectation is moving forward. We're going to see higher intensity rainfall events more often. We're going to see drought events more often. All of this data is given to policymakers. And I do think there is keen interest in it.

Erin Murphy

I wanted to ask you about a report that a colleague of mine worked on this summer regarding climate changes and planting zones, and how some people are having to plant differently at different times of year. And the story essentially said that right now it's at least in the Midwest, in Iowa, it's mainly impacting like gardeners and fruit growers, not necessarily row crops yet. But my question to you is, might that be something if you know, if the patterns hold, is that something that row crop farmers should be having to look out for.

Justin Glisan

It will be. So if you look at the state of the art climate modeling that we have. Basically about to 2070, we see an increase in yields across the corn belt, across the ag belt. And this is in concert with a warming atmosphere. Warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor. Higher intensity events more often. We're not seeing widespread rainfalls like we did several decades ago. So it's more sporadic rainfall. Now, luckily, the science is keeping us on par with the trends that we're seeing, but

Erin Murphy

When you say the science…like for growing and planting?

Justin Glisan

The hybridizations, yes. And that's where you talk about weather information and climate data. It helps producers and farmers pick the hybridization for the next season, knowing that soil profiles might be drier. We could see drier conditions next growing season, given El Nino, La Nina or anything else in the climate system. So the science is going to help us in terms of planting zones. Row crops will be impacted. It's just a matter of time. And what we do on a whole scale, global effort in terms of climate change mitigation, in the impacts that we're seeing. Part of my responsibility as state climatologist is providing that information to all sectors, including agriculture, so that we can be better prepared for the impacts that we will see, but that we're seeing right now.

Erin Murphy

Yeah, you say it's just a matter of time. Are we talking five years, 20 years?

Justin Glisan

If you again, the state of the art climate modeling and Iowa State does an excellent job with this. It's looking like past 2050, 2060, 2070 is where we're going to start to see a difference, because we're going to see a rise in summertime temperatures, if the projections are true. And a rise in those summertime temperatures, coupled with seeing less rainfall in July, as we've seen over the last 20 years, that's where you can get into drought conditions rapidly. Rapid onset drought. And that's where you can start to see yield losses or impacts to the row crops.

Kay Henderson

We often wait till September 21st to say, hey, fall is kicking off. Given the discussion that we've just had about how temperature changes and drought and, you know, torrential rains are happening. Will we get to a point where we redefine what fall, winter, summer and spring are?

Justin Glisan

Well, I use climatological seasons. So they're segments of months. It's easier for me than astronomical seasons. But yes, excellent question. You look at the growing season with a warming environment. About a degree and a half increase since 1895 here in the state of Iowa. And that's basically across the mid-latitudes, where a majority of the Northern hemisphere lives. More water vapor in the atmosphere. We've increased the growing season by anywhere 15 to 20 days. Okay. So we're seeing the first frost and freeze in fall pushed further back and seeing a similar behavior in spring. So the shoulder seasons are becoming more variable. We look at those shoulder seasons, and when shoulder seasons I mean summer, spring and fall. That's where we are transitioning either from mesoscale processes or thunderstorms that give us a majority of the rainfall during the growing season to synoptic scale, or the low pressures that come through every 5 to 7 days. So talking about seasonality, we're seeing a change in seasonality. We're seeing more severe weather in winter. Winter is the fastest warming season of any of the seasons for many of the states in the upper Midwest. So there's going to be impact on planting earlier, planting or harvesting later. Also gives us a buffer. If we are seeing a dip in July rainfall during the hottest month Climatologically, this could give us some sort of buffer in terms of strategy, when to plant or what to plant and where to plant. So all those little cogs in the climate system are the things that we try to get out to our farmers and producers and to the general public, whereas you have a lot of misinformation on social media. 2025 the summer of 2025 was supposed to be a dust bowl here in Iowa. Turned into a mud bowl, the sixth wettest summer on record. So climate services are here to provide the information – the correct and best information to our farmers, producers and the general public versus Facebook and Twitter.

Erin Murphy

What is the source of misinformation in weather? Where does that stuff come from?

Justin Glisan

Oh.

Erin Murphy

I mean social media clearly. But where does it originate, I guess?

Justin Glisan

A lot of, I don't want to say harebrained science. But there's been an ingrained way of looking at the climate system, more of a cyclical behavior versus processes that are occurring because of a warmer atmosphere and more water vapor. Those two things increase instability. They also are the ingredients needed for thunderstorms. So talking about is it getting windier? Are we seeing higher precipitation rates? Well, we can run those climate models forward, but we can also run the climate models backwards. And those climate models, if they're able to produce events that we've seen previously, we know that they're physically producing realistic future projections. Then we take that information, distill it down. We bring in social scientists because as scientists were robotic in terms of how we discuss results and forecasts and outlooks with our clientele. So producing a better way of getting that information out and quashing the bad social media information is, again, another aspect of my job.

Kay Henderson

Well, one of your jobs is to, you know, evaluate the climate in regards to planting and making farming decisions. You mentioned that you talk to the insurance industry a lot. What is the number one thing they want to know?

Justin Glisan

Severe weather. Are we going to see more hail? Are we going to see more straight line winds? And yes and yes.

Erin Murphy

You have been the state climatologist we talked about since 2018. The office has been around for decades before that. Do all states have a state climatologist?

Justin Glisan

As of right now, 49 states have a state climatologist. I believe Arkansas does not have one at this moment. But there's kind of an ebb and flow of state climatologists. My predecessor, Harry Hillaker, was one of the oldest state climatologists, in office 37 years. So when I started, I was the youngest. More gray hair, a little thinner, too. But.

Erin Murphy

So Iowa loves its incumbents. Even state climatologists stay around forever.

Kay Henderson

[LAUGHTER]

Justin Glisan

You know, it's, I said this before, I still get goosebumps driving to the office because I love my job. It's my dream job. I get to deal with bad stuff. I get to deal with good stuff. But speaking of our family of state climatologists, we have each other's backs and I learn a lot from my colleagues.

Erin Murphy

And that's what I wanted to ask to kind of set it up. When you, as I understand, there's a national association, too. When you get together, what are the kind of things that you discuss?

Justin Glisan

So the American Association of State Climatologists just met in June in Kansas City. I get to see, it's like a family. It really is. And we discuss, you know, this year we discussed budget cuts. We discussed how we can provide our climate services without a budget, with no budget, with little budget. How we can back each other up. I talk with the surrounding state climatologists almost on a daily basis, because we coordinate the U.S. Drought Monitor depiction. But we also cover each other in terms of, think of the National Weather Service during a government shutdown. I take over their climate responsibilities. So if a state climatologist can't do a discussion or can't do a talk or needs help in terms of an expertise that they don't have. I'm a meteorologist. We have some hydrologists. We have various other types of state climatologists. So we act to get the best information out. And we again, there's layer upon layer of what we do for each other.

Kay Henderson

So looming government shutdown. How are you prepping for that?

Justin Glisan

So we've gone through this before. I just want to make sure that our National Weather Service office is covered in terms of what I can do. Lots of interviews. I take over interviews for them. I take more of the climate side of their operation. But luckily, it's looking like in the outlooks we should stay warm and less active. So if we do have a government shutdown, and I hate to say this, this would be the prime time to have it if you're at the National Weather Service, because it's not as active as it could be. But…

Erin Murphy

I feel like we should all be knocking on wood right now.

Justin Glisan

And I, you know, part of I love the National Weather Service. I'm a meteorologist. I've made a lot of friends in the National Weather Service. I make sure that they're fed. I send them dinner every so often just to show my gratitude to them. Because in the current climate, for lack of a better word, a lot of distant morale. I was at the State Emergency Operations Center for the Flood and Drought outlook back in late winter. I asked one of the meteorologists there what morale was like, and I got two thumbs down. I don't like to see that. Their mandate is the protection of life and property. That's the only reason they're there. They love meteorology, but they're not there to get rich. They're not there to be famous. They're there to protect us. So anything that I can do to back them up, I do. And I know that the general public appreciates our weather service people and our climate services, and it's reassuring that when I hear from them.

Kay Henderson

What is the pipeline? Are people choosing meteorology? Are there people coming up through the ranks, or is it a profession that you need to go out and encourage people to pursue?

Justin Glisan

Both. Both. So I was part of the Twister generation. Once Twister came out, everybody wanted to be a storm chaser. But when, a previous appearance that I've had, I talked about being catatonic as a kid of severe weather. So I had to learn all that I could about meteorology and climatology. But pushing people into the field is definitely one of the perks of being in this position. We have to talk about artificial intelligence, machine learning. What aspects of that are going to be taken over in meteorology? Is the U.S. drought monitor going to move into an artificial intelligence algorithm that draws that map? No, not right now. But we always need human eyes and hands on the products that are being produced. But definitely, you think of meteorology as a flip of the coin, right? No, it's physics, chemistry, radiation. It's a very hard science to learn. So we need all the meteorologists that we can out there as we increase computing power, but as artificial intelligence and other machine learning aspects come into the science. But overall, what we're trying to do is put the best products out and protect life and property.

Kay Henderson

Well, thank you for your views today, and I'm sure we'll have you back to talk about the weather at a date in the future.

Justin Glisan

Always an honor to be here, Kay.

Kay Henderson

You can watch every episode of Iowa Press at iowapbs.org. For everyone here at Iowa PBS, thanks for watching today.

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Funding for Iowa Press was provided by Friends, the Iowa PBS Foundation.

Banking in Iowa goes beyond transactions. Banks work to help people and small businesses succeed. And Iowa banks are committed to building confident banking relationships. Iowa banks, your partner through it all.