The Basco 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.
80° on Nov. 11, 2022, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 78° in 1999.
Basco’s center stands about 640 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 580 ft to 680 ft, a difference of 100 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Warsaw Formation and Salem Limestone, from the Middle Mississippian, 331 to 347 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.
Limestone. Age: Middle Mississippian, 331 to 347 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Middle Mississippian, 331 to 347 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Early Mississippian to Middle Mississippian, 331 to 359 million years old. About 2 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 Basco reaches the Gulf of America by way of Bear Creek and the Mississippi: about 1,350 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Basco; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Basco has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in January. A normal year brings about 23 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 40 inches of water.
On November 14 Basco normally reaches 52° and falls to 33°. The record high is 78°, in 1999; the record low 14°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.13 in, fell in 1985.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Bentley, 5 miles east-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.