The Denver 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
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.
Denver’s center stands about 980 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 920 ft to 1,060 ft, a difference of 140 ft: gently rolling country.
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.
Limestone, dolostone. Age: Middle Devonian to Late Devonian, 374 to 388 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Shale, dolostone. Age: Late Ordovician, 447 to 454 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Late Ordovician to Silurian, 434 to 447 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Dolostone, limestone. Age: Middle Devonian, 384 to 394 million years old. About 2 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 Denver reaches the Gulf of America by way of Quarter Section Run, Baskins Run, the Cedar River, the Iowa and the Mississippi: about 1,630 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Denver; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Denver 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 Denver 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, 9 miles south-southwest, 110 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
