From Radio Iowa

The Labor Day weekend forecast calls for warm weather and sunny skies for much of Iowa — and it follows a month where the state was generally cooler and drier than usual.

State climatologist Harry Hillaker says August wrapped up being unseasonably mild statewide. “Primarily, it was about 3.4 degrees cooler than normal,” Hillaker says. “We only had five days out of 31 that averaged above-normal on temperatures and none of those did it by very much.”

It was the 16th coolest August in Iowa in 145 years of record-keeping as well as the coolest August since 2004. As for rainfall, August was the third straight month of below-normal precipitation, but Hillaker says there was an unusual twist.