The Tama 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
Partly cloudy; warmer
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Showers likely
77° on Nov. 14, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1894. Next is 75° in 1941.
Tama’s center stands about 840 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 800 ft to 980 ft, a difference of 180 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Famennian formations (shale, siltstone), from the Late Devonian, 359 to 374 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.
Shale, limestone, dolostone. Age: Late Devonian, 374 to 384 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 374 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Dolostone, limestone, siltstone. Age: Early Mississippian, 347 to 359 million years old. About 5 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 Tama reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Iowa and the Mississippi: about 1,580 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Tama; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Tama has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 10° in January. A normal year brings about 33 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 35 inches of water.
On November 14 Tama normally reaches 47° and falls to 27°. The record high is 77°, in 1999; the record low 0°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 1.43 in, fell in 1926.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1894 at Toledo 3 N, 5 miles north. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
