The Columbus 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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5.47 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1892. The next wettest, 4.29 inches, fell in 1958.
Columbus’s center stands about 910 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 860 ft to 940 ft, a difference of 80 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Cherokee Group (sandstone, shale), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
The section below crosses 2 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.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 18 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 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 Columbus reaches the Gulf of America by way of Brush Creek, the Spring, the Neosho, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,170 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Murray Lake and Ozark Lake.
600 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Columbus; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Columbus has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in January. A normal year brings about 7 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 46 inches of water.
On November 14 Columbus normally reaches 58° and falls to 37°. The record high is 82°, in 1964; the record low 10°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 3.25 in, fell in 1985.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1892 at Columbus, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
