The Grissom AFB 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.
2° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 13° in 2014.
Grissom AFB’s center stands about 790 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 720 ft to 830 ft, a difference of 110 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Wabash Formation (limestone, dolostone), from the Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old.
The section below crosses 2 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, dolostone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 24 mi of the line.
Limestone, dolostone. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 0.5 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 Grissom AFB reaches the Gulf of America by way of Little Deer Creek, Pipe Creek, the Wabash, Big Bayou, the Wabash River Old Channel, the Old Channel Wabash, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,460 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 Grissom AFB; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Grissom AFB has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 17° in January. A normal year brings about 25 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 41 inches of water.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Young America, 12 miles west-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.