The Pottawattamie Park 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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2° on Nov. 17, 1959, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1897. Next is 6° in 2019.
Pottawattamie Park’s center stands about 650 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 570 ft to 700 ft, a difference of 130 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Antrim Shale (black-shale), from the Devonian, 359 to 422 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 51×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Black-shale. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 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 Pottawattamie Park reaches Lake Michigan by way of Trail Creek: about 1 river miles. From there it moves on through the Great Lakes, over Niagara Falls and down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Pottawattamie Park; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Pottawattamie Park has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 17° in January. A normal year brings about 65 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 42 inches of water.
On November 14 Pottawattamie Park normally reaches 48° and falls to 33°. The record high is 72°, in 1958; the record low 12°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.62 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1897 at Laporte, 10 miles southeast, 160 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
