The Metropolis 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
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
10° on Nov. 13, 1986, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1949. Next is 10° in 2019.
Metropolis’s center stands about 360 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 280 ft to 400 ft, a difference of 120 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Cretaceous undivided (sandstone, shale), from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 84 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 58×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 84 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Limestone, sandstone, shale. Age: Middle Mississippian, 331 to 347 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. Age: Tertiary to Holocene, less than 66 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 0.7 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 Metropolis reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,010 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Metropolis; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Metropolis has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 27° in January. A normal year brings about 9 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 50 inches of water.
On November 14 Metropolis normally reaches 59° and falls to 38°. The record high is 77°, in 2025; the record low 12°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.50 in, fell in 1958.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1949 at Paducah Barkley Regional Airport, 8 miles southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
