The Belvue 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.
84° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 81° in 2016.
Belvue’s center stands about 960 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 930 ft to 1,130 ft, a difference of 200 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Tabor Hill, about 1,300 ft, 14 miles west-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 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.
Sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 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 Belvue reaches the Gulf of America by way of Lost Creek, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,650 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 Belvue; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Belvue has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in January. A normal year brings about 17 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 35 inches of water.
On November 14 Belvue normally reaches 55° and falls to 32°. The record high is 76°, in 1990; the record low 3°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 1.95 in, fell in 1931.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Wamego 4 W, 10 miles west, 210 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.