The Wapello 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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77° on Nov. 17, 2001, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1938. Next is 76° in 1999.
Wapello’s center stands about 590 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 550 ft to 640 ft, a difference of 90 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 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 61×. 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: Early Mississippian to Middle Mississippian, 331 to 359 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Limestone, dolostone. Age: Middle Devonian to Late Devonian, 374 to 388 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 374 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Middle Devonian, 384 to 394 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Middle Devonian to Late Devonian, 359 to 388 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Dolostone, limestone, siltstone. Age: Early Mississippian, 347 to 359 million years old. About 0.5 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 Wapello reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Iowa and the Mississippi: about 1,420 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Wapello; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Wapello has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 15° in January. About 36 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Wapello normally reaches 50° and falls to 32°. The record high is 76°, in 1999; the record low 10°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 0.82 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1938 at New Boston Dam 17, 7 miles east. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
