The Ames 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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83° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1885. Next is 80° in 2016.
Ames’s center stands about 1,310 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,280 ft to 1,390 ft, a difference of 110 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Twin Mounds, about 1,510 ft, 5 miles southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvium (sand, silt, clay), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 59×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 16 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Claystone, mudstone, shale. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 1 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 Ames reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Republican, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,780 river miles.
1,170 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Ames; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Ames has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 19° in January. A normal year brings about 19 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 28 inches of water.
On November 14 Ames normally reaches 54° and falls to 32°. The record high is 76°, in 2025; the record low 0°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 0.74 in, fell in 1926.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1885 from the Concordia Area threaded record (Concordia Asos, 11 miles west, 150 ft higher). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
