The Mitchell 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.
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny; warmer
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Sunny
Mostly sunny
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Mostly sunny
6° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 7° in 1959.
Mitchell’s center stands about 680 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 550 ft to 870 ft, a difference of 320 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Gobblers Knob, about 960 ft, 7 miles west-southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Blue River Group (limestone), from the Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old.
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 40×. 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. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 21 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 0.4 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 Mitchell reaches the Gulf of America by way of the East Fork White, the White River, Big Bayou, the Wabash River Old Channel, the Old Channel Wabash, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,340 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 Mitchell; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Mitchell has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 21° in January. A normal year brings about 16 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 48 inches of water.
On November 14 Mitchell normally reaches 54° and falls to 33°. The record high is 75°, in 1978; the record low 7°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.77 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Oolitic Purdue Ex Frm, 11 miles north-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
