The Aurora 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
Partly cloudy; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
83° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1885. Next is 80° in 2016.
Aurora’s center stands about 1,490 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,390 ft to 1,670 ft, a difference of 280 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Loess (silt), 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 47×. 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 10 mi of the line.
Claystone, mudstone, shale. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 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 Aurora reaches the Gulf of America by way of Elm Creek, the Republican, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,800 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 Aurora; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Aurora 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 Aurora 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, 9 miles northwest). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
