The Downs 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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Mostly sunny; warmer
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Showers likely
81° on Nov. 14, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1964. Next is 81° in 2016.
Downs’s center stands about 1,490 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,460 ft to 1,580 ft, a difference of 120 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is South Hill, about 1,800 ft, 12 miles southwest.
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 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.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, chalk. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 0.6 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 Downs reaches the Gulf of America by way of Waconda Lake, the Solomon, the Smoky Hill, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,950 river miles.
Lake on the way: Waconda 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 Downs; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Downs has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 14° in January. About 26 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Downs normally reaches 55° and falls to 27°. The record high is 81°, in 1999; the record low 3°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.19 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1964 at Glen Elder Lake, 12 miles east. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
