The Jamestown 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
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Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
83° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1885. Next is 80° in 2016.
Jamestown’s center stands about 1,440 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,380 ft to 1,520 ft, a difference of 140 ft: gently rolling country.
The section below crosses 3 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 12 mi of the line.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 3 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 Jamestown reaches the Gulf of America by way of Cheyenne Creek, Buffalo Creek, the Republican, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,830 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 Jamestown; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Jamestown has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 19° in January. A normal year brings about 19 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 28 inches of water.
On November 14 Jamestown normally reaches 54° and falls to 32°. The record high is 76°, in 2025; the record low 0°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 0.74 in, fell in 1926.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1885 from the Concordia Area threaded record (Concordia Asos, 12 miles east-southeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
