The Centropolis 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
Sunny
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
83° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1895. Next is 81° in 1956.
Centropolis’s center stands about 960 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 940 ft to 1,100 ft, a difference of 160 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Chippewa Hills, about 1,160 ft, 11 miles south.
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 64×. 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 11 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. 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 0.7 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 Centropolis reaches the Gulf of America by way of Eightmile Creek, the Marais des Cygnes, the Osage, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,720 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 Centropolis; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Centropolis has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in January. A normal year brings about 9 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 40 inches of water.
On November 14 Centropolis normally reaches 55° and falls to 32°. The record high is 79°, in 1964; the record low 9°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 2.37 in, fell in 1931.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1895 at Ottawa, 8 miles south-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
