The Aplington plate. Relief from Copernicus GLO-30; rivers and lakes from USGS NHD; watersheds from the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset; roads and city limits from Census TIGER 2024.
Sunny
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
78° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1914. Next is 76° in 2012.
Aplington’s center stands about 990 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 940 ft to 1,080 ft, a difference of 140 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Famennian formations (shale, siltstone), from the Late Devonian, 359 to 374 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 64×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Shale, siltstone. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 374 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone, dolostone. Age: Late Devonian, 374 to 384 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Limestone, dolostone. Age: Middle Devonian to Late Devonian, 374 to 388 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Dolostone, limestone, siltstone. Age: Early Mississippian, 347 to 359 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale.
Heights from Copernicus GLO-90 (a surface model: it includes buildings and tree canopy); summits from USGS GNIS; rivers from USGS NHDPlus HR; rock from the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation.
A raindrop that lands in Aplington reaches the Gulf of America by way of Beaver Creek, the Cedar River, the Iowa and the Mississippi: about 1,640 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Aplington; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Aplington has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 8° in January. About 35 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Aplington normally reaches 45° and falls to 26°. The record high is 71°, in 1964; the record low −5°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 0.82 in, fell in 1997.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1914 at Allison, 13 miles north-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
