The Formoso 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
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Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
80° on Nov. 17, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1961. Next is 78° in 2021.
Formoso’s center stands about 1,530 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,430 ft to 1,560 ft, a difference of 130 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Loess (silt), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, 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 44×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, chalk. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 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 Formoso reaches the Gulf of America by way of East Marsh Creek, Marsh Creek, Buffalo Creek, the Republican, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,850 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 Formoso; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Formoso has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in January. About 30 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Formoso normally reaches 55° and falls to 31°. The record high is 73°, in 2025; the record low 6°, in 2000. The most rain on this date, 0.27 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1961 at Courtland, 5 miles east. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
