The Morrowville 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.
83° on Nov. 17, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 82° in 1999.
Morrowville’s center stands about 1,350 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,310 ft to 1,480 ft, a difference of 170 ft: gently rolling country.
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 50×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Claystone, mudstone, shale. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. 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 4 mi of the line.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 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 Morrowville reaches the Gulf of America by way of Mill Creek, the Little Blue, the Big Blue, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,820 river miles.
Lake on the way: Tuttle Creek 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 Morrowville; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Morrowville has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 15° in January. A normal year brings about 14 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 32 inches of water.
On November 14 Morrowville normally reaches 53° and falls to 29°. The record high is 78°, in 2025; the record low 4°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.75 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Washington, 7 miles east-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.