The Columbus 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
Partly cloudy
Sunny
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
3° on Nov. 17, 1959, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1901. Next is 5° in 2019.
Columbus’s center stands about 710 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 640 ft to 750 ft, a difference of 110 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows St. Louis Limestone, from the Middle Mississippian, 331 to 347 million years old.
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, coal. Age: Middle Pennsylvanian to Late Pennsylvanian, 304 to 315 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Middle Mississippian, 331 to 347 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Middle Mississippian, 331 to 347 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 72 to 84 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Early Pennsylvanian to Middle Pennsylvanian, 307 to 324 million years old. About 4 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 Columbus reaches the Gulf of America by way of McKee Creek, the Illinois and the Mississippi: about 1,330 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Columbus; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Columbus has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 19° in January. About 36 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Columbus normally reaches 52° and falls to 34°. The record high is 76°, in 2025; the record low 9°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 1.03 in, fell in 1926.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1901 from the Quincy Area threaded record (Quincy Regional Airport, 4 miles southwest). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
