The Golden Gate 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.
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5° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1887. Next is 7° in 1959.
Golden Gate’s center stands about 400 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 380 ft to 520 ft, a difference of 140 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Boyd Hill, about 610 ft, 11 miles south.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Mattoon Formation (shale), from the Late Pennsylvanian, 304 to 307 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. Age: Late Pennsylvanian, 304 to 307 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 Golden Gate reaches the Gulf of America by way of Briar Branch, the Little Wabash, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,190 river miles.
970 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Golden Gate; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Golden Gate has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 24° in January. About 46 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Golden Gate normally reaches 57° and falls to 37°. The record high is 77°, in 1931; the record low 8°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 4.89 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1887 at 1 ENE Fairfield, 8 miles west-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
