The Detroit 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; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
84° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 83° in 2016.
Detroit’s center stands about 1,180 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,110 ft to 1,250 ft, a difference of 140 ft: gently rolling country.
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 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.
Shale, limestone. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand. 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 Detroit reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Smoky Hill, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,740 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 Detroit; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Detroit has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 94° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in January. A normal year brings about 12 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 34 inches of water.
On November 14 Detroit normally reaches 58° and falls to 35°. The record high is 77°, in 2025; the record low 6°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 1.06 in, fell in 1909.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Abilene, 5 miles west. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
