The Princeton 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
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Chance of showers
73° on Nov. 11, 1964, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1938. Next is 73° in 1989.
Princeton’s center stands about 590 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 560 ft to 770 ft, a difference of 210 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Gower Formation (dolostone, mudstone), from the Silurian, 425 to 434 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.
Dolostone, limestone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Dolostone, mudstone. Age: Silurian, 425 to 434 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone, siltstone. Age: Early Pennsylvanian to Middle Pennsylvanian, 307 to 324 million years old. About 0.8 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 Princeton reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Mississippi: about 1,480 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Princeton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Princeton has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 14° in January. About 37 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Princeton normally reaches 49° and falls to 32°. The record high is 72°, in 1971; the record low 10°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.60 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1938 at Le Claire L&D 14, 8 miles south-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
