The Palmer 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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Mostly sunny; warmer
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Partly cloudy
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3° on Nov. 12, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 8° in 1986.
Palmer’s center stands about 620 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 590 ft to 640 ft, a difference of 50 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Bond Formation (shale, sandstone, limestone), 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, sandstone, limestone. 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 Palmer reaches the Gulf of America by way of Bear Creek, the South Fork Sangamon, the Sangamon, the Illinois and the Mississippi: about 1,420 river miles.
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 Palmer; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Palmer has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 19° in January. A normal year brings about 16 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 38 inches of water.
On November 14 Palmer normally reaches 53° and falls to 33°. The record high is 80°, in 1999; the record low 8°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.59 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Morrisonville, 4 miles southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
