The Ferris 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; warmer
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80° on Nov. 11, 2022, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 78° in 1999.
Ferris’s center stands about 690 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 630 ft to 700 ft, a difference of 70 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 4 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 14 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Middle Mississippian, 331 to 347 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Early Mississippian to Middle Mississippian, 331 to 359 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Early Pennsylvanian to Middle Pennsylvanian, 307 to 324 million years old. About 1 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 Ferris reaches the Gulf of America by way of Long Creek, the La Moine, the Illinois and the Mississippi: about 1,370 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Ferris; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Ferris 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 Ferris 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, 9 miles south-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
