The Bishop Hill 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
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Chance of showers
−5° on Nov. 17, 1959, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1887. Next is 2° in 2019.
Bishop Hill’s center stands about 790 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 720 ft to 840 ft, a difference of 120 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Carbondale Formation (shale, sandstone, coal), from the Middle Pennsylvanian to Late Pennsylvanian, 304 to 315 million years old.
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, sandstone, coal. Age: Middle Pennsylvanian to Late Pennsylvanian, 304 to 315 million years old. About 24 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 Bishop Hill reaches the Gulf of America by way of the South Edwards, the Edwards and the Mississippi: about 1,470 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Bishop Hill; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bishop Hill has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 13° in January. About 39 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Bishop Hill normally reaches 49° and falls to 29°. The record high is 75°, in 1989; the record low 6°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 2.08 in, fell in 1926.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1887 at Galva, 5 miles east-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
