The Buffalo Prairie 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
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
74° on Nov. 11, 2022, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1940. Next is 71° in 2012.
Buffalo Prairie’s center stands about 760 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 640 ft to 780 ft, a difference of 140 ft: gently rolling country.
The section below crosses 5 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, sandstone. Age: Early Pennsylvanian to Middle Pennsylvanian, 307 to 324 million years old. About 17 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Early Pennsylvanian, 315 to 324 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Middle Devonian, 384 to 394 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone, dolostone. Age: Middle Devonian to Late Devonian, 374 to 388 million years old. About 0.7 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Middle Devonian to Late Devonian, 359 to 388 million years old. About 0.3 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 Buffalo Prairie reaches the Gulf of America by way of Deerlick Branch, Eliza Creek and the Mississippi: about 1,430 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Buffalo Prairie; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Buffalo Prairie has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 13° in January. About 36 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1940 at Illinois City Dam 16, 10 miles northwest, 210 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
