The Kempton 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
Sunny
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
75° on Nov. 11, 2022, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1990. Next is 74° in 1999.
Kempton’s center stands about 730 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 670 ft to 750 ft, a difference of 80 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 Kempton reaches the Gulf of America by way of Kelly Creek, the North Fork Vermilion, the Vermilion, the Illinois and the Mississippi: about 1,520 river miles.
Lake on the way: Peoria Lake.
1,190 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Kempton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Kempton has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 14° in January. A normal year brings about 23 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 38 inches of water.
On November 14 Kempton normally reaches 49° and falls to 30°. The record high is 74°, in 1999; the record low 8°, in 1996. The most rain on this date, 0.80 in, fell in 1991.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1990 at Dwight Wwtp, 15 miles northwest, 100 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
