The Cedar Falls 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
Partly cloudy; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Showers likely
79° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1895. Next is 74° in 1941.
Cedar Falls’s center stands about 890 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 840 ft to 980 ft, a difference of 140 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Cedar Valley Group (limestone, dolostone), from the Middle Devonian to Late Devonian, 374 to 388 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 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.
Limestone, dolostone. Age: Middle Devonian to Late Devonian, 374 to 388 million years old. About 21 mi of the line.
Dolostone, limestone. Age: Middle Devonian, 384 to 394 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Late Ordovician to Silurian, 434 to 447 million years old. About 1 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 Cedar Falls reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Cedar River, the Iowa and the Mississippi: about 1,610 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Cedar Falls; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Cedar Falls has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 11° in January. A normal year brings about 39 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 36 inches of water.
On November 14 Cedar Falls normally reaches 48° and falls to 28°. The record high is 73°, in 2025; the record low −3°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 1.25 in, fell in 1902.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1895 from the Waterloo Area threaded record (Waterloo Municipal Airport, 3 miles northeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
