The Centralia 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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79° on Nov. 17, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1951. Next is 76° in 1964.
Centralia’s center stands about 1,290 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,230 ft to 1,350 ft, a difference of 120 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Drift (sand, silt), from the Pleistocene, less than 2.6 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 63×. 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 17 mi of the line.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 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 Centralia reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Black Vermillion, the Big Blue, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,770 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 Centralia; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Centralia has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 88° in July; winter nights fall to about 15° in January. About 33 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Centralia normally reaches 53° and falls to 29°. The record high is 75°, in 1964; the record low 4°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.51 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1951 at Frankfort 6 NE, 12 miles west-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
