The Cherokee 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.
75° on Nov. 14, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1921. Next is 75° in 2001.
Cherokee’s center stands about 1,200 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,170 ft to 1,410 ft, a difference of 240 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Dakata and Windrow Formations (sandstone, shale), from the Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 94 to 113 million years old.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 60×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 94 to 113 million years old. About 24 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 Cherokee reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Little Sioux, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,920 river miles.
1,170 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Cherokee; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Cherokee has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 7° in January. A normal year brings about 38 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 31 inches of water.
On November 14 Cherokee normally reaches 46° and falls to 25°. The record high is 75°, in 1999; the record low −17°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 1.38 in, fell in 1926.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1921 at Cherokee, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.