The Atwood 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
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
3.41 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1893. The next wettest, 3.02 inches, fell in 1985.
Atwood’s center stands about 670 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 650 ft to 690 ft, a difference of 40 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Mattoon Formation (shale), from the Late Pennsylvanian, 304 to 307 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 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. Age: Late Pennsylvanian, 304 to 307 million years old. About 15 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone, limestone. Age: Late Pennsylvanian, 304 to 307 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone, coal. Age: Middle Pennsylvanian to Late Pennsylvanian, 304 to 315 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Early Pennsylvanian to Middle Pennsylvanian, 307 to 324 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
Siltstone. Age: Early Mississippian to Middle Mississippian, 331 to 359 million years old. About 0.5 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Pennsylvanian, 304 to 307 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 Atwood reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Kaskaskia and the Mississippi: about 1,350 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Carlyle Reservoir and Lake Shelbyville.
1,090 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Atwood; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Atwood has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in January. A normal year brings about 17 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 40 inches of water.
On November 14 Atwood normally reaches 52° and falls to 33°. The record high is 77°, in 1971; the record low 9°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 2.20 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Tuscola, 9 miles east. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
