The Van Horne 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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76° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 75° in 1941.
Van Horne’s center stands about 950 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 870 ft to 970 ft, a difference of 100 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Lime Creek Formation (shale, limestone, dolostone), from the Late Devonian, 374 to 384 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 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 7 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone, siltstone. Age: Early Pennsylvanian to Middle Pennsylvanian, 307 to 324 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone, dolostone. Age: Late Devonian, 374 to 384 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Dolostone, limestone. Age: Middle Devonian, 384 to 394 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Silurian, 431 to 440 million years old. About 0.6 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 Van Horne reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Cedar River, the Iowa and the Mississippi: about 1,560 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Van Horne; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Van Horne has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 8° in January. A normal year brings about 34 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 38 inches of water.
On November 14 Van Horne normally reaches 45° and falls to 26°. The record high is 73°, in 1950; the record low 1°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 1.25 in, fell in 1902.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Vinton, 10 miles north-northeast, 150 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
