The Gridley 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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80° on Nov. 16, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1960. Next is 79° in 1971.
Gridley’s center stands about 1,160 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,060 ft to 1,220 ft, a difference of 160 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Shawnee Group (limestone, shale), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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 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 8 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Gravel. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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 Gridley reaches the Gulf of America by way of Dinner Creek, South Big Creek, Big Creek, the Neosho, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,340 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 Gridley; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Gridley has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 19° in January. About 37 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Gridley normally reaches 57° and falls to 34°. The record high is 79°, in 1971; the record low 8°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.55 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1960 at John Redmond Lake, 13 miles northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
