The Matthews 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.
76° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 74° in 2010.
Matthews’s center stands about 880 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 840 ft to 950 ft, a difference of 110 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pleasant Mills Formation (dolostone, limestone), from the Silurian, 422 to 445 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.
Dolostone, limestone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 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 Matthews reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Mississinewa, the Wabash, Big Bayou, the Wabash River Old Channel, the Old Channel Wabash, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,520 river miles.
Lake on the way: Mississinewa Lake.
970 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Matthews; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Matthews has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 19° in January. A normal year brings about 32 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 42 inches of water.
On November 14 Matthews normally reaches 51° and falls to 34°. The record high is 71°, in 2010; the record low 8°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.46 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Hartford City 4 ESE, 11 miles east-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.