The Belknap 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
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12° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1923. Next is 16° in 1997.
Belknap’s center stands about 350 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 330 ft to 510 ft, a difference of 180 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Hairy Hill, about 520 ft, 2 miles northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Ste. Genevieve Limestone, from the Middle Mississippian, 331 to 347 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 50×. 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, sandstone, shale. Age: Late Mississippian, 324 to 331 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Limestone, sandstone, shale. Age: Middle Mississippian, 331 to 347 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 84 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Middle Mississippian, 331 to 347 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Early Pennsylvanian, 315 to 324 million years old. About 0.8 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 Belknap reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Cache and the Mississippi: about 1,020 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Belknap; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Belknap has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 26° in January. A normal year brings about 7 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 49 inches of water.
On November 14 Belknap normally reaches 58° and falls to 39°. The record high is 75°, in 1999; the record low 14°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.04 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1923 at Olmsted Lock And Dam, 12 miles southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
