The Kingsley 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.
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Showers likely
76° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1896. Next is 74° in 1953.
Kingsley’s center stands about 1,240 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,190 ft to 1,410 ft, a difference of 220 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.
The section below crosses 2 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.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 94 to 113 million years old. About 24 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Early Mississippian to Middle Mississippian, 331 to 359 million years old. About 0.4 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 Kingsley reaches the Gulf of America by way of the West Fork Little Sioux, the West Fork Ditch, the Monona Harrison Ditch, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,900 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 Kingsley; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Kingsley has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 7° in January. A normal year brings about 31 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 30 inches of water.
On November 14 Kingsley normally reaches 46° and falls to 24°. The record high is 72°, in 2001; the record low −24°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 1.33 in, fell in 1926.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1896 at Le Mars, 17 miles north-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
