Ah, late July. The time of year when the mention of the forecast makes one nostalgic for wind chill indexes. It's been a hot, dry month that has tested our patience, crops and pumping capacities at our water plants.

I recall, as I'm sure anyone who grew up in Iowa, the hot and humid days of summer, long before heat indexes were used, that the reason we felt so miserable was the fault of the humidity, not the heat. And if I had a dime for every time I heard "but it's good for the corn," I believe I would have a nice nest egg.

In combing through the news this week, I came upon an Associated Press story that gave me hard evidence on who or what was to blame for the humidity in the summer. The name of this menace? Corn.

Yes! The delicious irony of it all. The corn has been making us all miserable, according to some climatologists, for years.

Seriously.

Richard Raddatz, a climatologist at the University of Winnipeg, (a Canadian, it figures), has studied the transformation of the Canadian prairies from grassland to cropland. His findings? Crops, particularly corn, are driving up dew points as they put water into the atmosphere through evaporation. They also may make corn-growing areas cooler and alter rain patterns.

Some say the extra moisture could even add energy to thunderstorms, with one study arguing that a 2001 tornado in Benson, Minn. got a power boost from corn evaporation.

REAALLY.... Have they seen the weather this year? Cooler? Thunderstorms? Kidding, right? Tell it to my lawn, which crunches when I walk on it.

Raddatz and other researchers are looking at an old 19th century adage popularized by Charles Dana Wilber in an 1881 book touting the agricultural promise of Nebraska: "rain follows the plow." Wilber argued that the western Great Plains, which in the early 19th century had been labeled the "Great American Desert," could be transformed into a garden if people would expose its moist soil to the atmosphere.

It did rain for a few years, but a little thing called the "Dust Bowl" put an end to the belief, at least for over a hundred years. The Canadian argues that by "transpiring" more heavily than the prairie grasses that preceded them, and in relatively short periods, crops can generate air movements that can lead to storms, and intensify the season during which water is cycled through the atmosphere.

Blame it all on the corn, folks. I should have known that it was conspiring against us. I recall detasseling corn in the rain and the mud. The plants seemed to slap me around with their leaves, fighting to keep their tassels and end the terrible genetic experiments we were performing on them.

Making us suffer with humidity is a pretty sneaky way to pay us back, if you ask me.

All seriousness aside, climatologists are divided on this issue. University of Oklahoma climatologist Jeff Basara, who has spent most of his summers in Minnesota, traced a link between corn evaporation and an F2 tornado that injured seven people in Benson on June 11, 2001.

"There was going to be severe weather that day. But evaporation added enough moisture to the atmosphere and turned it from a day of localized severe weather reports to a day that really was a headline-maker," said Basara, who published his research in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society in 2005.

Another researcher found that since 1950, crops had replaced thousands of square miles of pastureland during the era of rising dew points. More significant, was the shift in corn-planting from 40-inch rows to 30-inch rows. "We're just pouring more water into the air," the researcher said.

Another climatologist who has studied dew point trends nationally, has found mixed results and is only "suspicious the two are related."

Perhaps someone should tell the corn to quit its self-imposed water diet and make it rain already. There's no reason people and plants can't live together, right?

As always, I welcome your comments. You can reach me by email at tstangl@lemarscomm.net, telephone 712-546-7031, x40 or toll free 1-800-728-0066 x40.

Thanks for reading, I'll keep in touch. Feel free to do the same.