The Blue Rapids 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.
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
3.10 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1941. The next wettest, 2.25 inches, fell in 1996.
Blue Rapids’s center stands about 1,170 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,100 ft to 1,400 ft, a difference of 300 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Twin Mounds, about 1,370 ft, 9 miles east-southeast.
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 55×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Shale, limestone. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 15 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 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 Rapids reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Big Blue, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,740 river miles.
Lake on the way: Tuttle Creek Lake.
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 Rapids; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Blue Rapids has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 15° in January. A normal year brings about 16 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 34 inches of water.
On November 14 Blue Rapids normally reaches 55° and falls to 30°. The record high is 82°, in 1999; the record low 4°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.77 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1941 at Marysville, 11 miles north. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
