Monroe County

I took a little trip today to Monroe County.  Family visits were on the agenda because of rain, but I also ended up mapping some prevented planting areas. 

One of my missions was to test the National Weather Service rainfall totals for storms.  I downloaded the material from their web site and did a lot of driving and observing.  I did have 6 rain gauge totals to confirm the data.  I found that I have been reading the data on the high side.  It did look like it was a good source of relative information, but when you read the scale, you should read on the low side instead of the high side,  Also keep in mind that picture is low resolution so accuracy along the edge of units is not real good. 

Crops in the Columbia area got plenty of rain today and look good.  South of Fountain, very little rain has fallen in the past 2 weeks.  Crops that were mudded in look poor.   All the corn was showing drought stress already.  Unfortunately a high river is keeping low spots too wet.  Wheat looked good all over the bottoms.