The Melvern 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.
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
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Sunny
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Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
82° on Nov. 14, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1973. Next is 80° in 1989.
Melvern’s center stands about 1,020 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 950 ft to 1,120 ft, a difference of 170 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Bebo Hill, about 1,230 ft, 15 miles west-southwest.
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 2 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 22 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. 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 Melvern reaches the Gulf of America by way of Long Creek, the Marais des Cygnes, the Osage, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,750 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 Melvern; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Melvern has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 20° in January. About 38 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Melvern normally reaches 57° and falls to 35°. The record high is 82°, in 1999; the record low 7°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.30 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1973 at Melvern Lake, 4 miles west. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
