The Blue Mound 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
Sunny
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
82° on Nov. 11, 1989, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1906. Next is 81° in 1999.
Blue Mound’s center stands about 1,050 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 990 ft to 1,100 ft, a difference of 110 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Kansas City Group (limestone, shale), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 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.
Limestone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.6 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 Blue Mound reaches the Gulf of America by way of Irish Creek, the Little Osage, the Osage, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,660 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 Blue Mound; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Blue Mound has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 20° in January. A normal year brings about 13 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 41 inches of water.
On November 14 Blue Mound normally reaches 56° and falls to 34°. The record high is 79°, in 1964; the record low 8°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.93 in, fell in 1909.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1906 at Garnett 1 E, 17 miles northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
