The Helmer 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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74° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 72° in 2022.
Helmer’s center stands about 990 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 930 ft to 1,070 ft, a difference of 140 ft: gently rolling country.
The section below crosses 3 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.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 6 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 Helmer reaches Lake Michigan by way of Turkey Creek, the Pigeon and the Saint Joseph: about 150 river miles. From there it moves on through the Great Lakes, over Niagara Falls and down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
90 miles of the trip are on the Saint Joseph.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Helmer; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Helmer has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 16° in January. A normal year brings about 39 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 39 inches of water.
On November 14 Helmer normally reaches 48° and falls to 31°. The record high is 71°, in 1902; the record low 7°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.41 in, fell in 1959.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Angola, 12 miles northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
