The Spring Hill 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.
81° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1878. Next is 76° in 2001.
Spring Hill’s center stands about 870 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 800 ft to 960 ft, a difference of 160 ft: gently rolling country.
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 62×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Shale, sandstone, siltstone. Age: Early Pennsylvanian to Middle Pennsylvanian, 307 to 324 million years old. About 15 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone. Age: Middle Pennsylvanian, 307 to 315 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Middle Pennsylvanian, 307 to 315 million years old. About 3 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 Spring Hill reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Middle River, the Des Moines and the Mississippi: about 1,530 river miles.
Lake on the way: Roberts Creek.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Spring Hill; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Spring Hill has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 14° in January. A normal year brings about 36 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 36 inches of water.
On November 14 Spring Hill normally reaches 49° and falls to 31°. The record high is 74°, in 2025; the record low −1°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.86 in, fell in 1947.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1878 from the Des Moines Area threaded record (Des Moines International Airport, 8 miles north). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.