The Oskaloosa 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
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
83° on Nov. 14, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1967. Next is 80° in 1980.
Oskaloosa’s center stands about 1,110 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 950 ft to 1,150 ft, a difference of 200 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Drift (sand, silt), from the Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
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 56×. 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 13 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 9 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 Oskaloosa reaches the Gulf of America by way of Burr Oak Branch, Slough Creek, the Delaware, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,610 river miles.
Lake on the way: Perry 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 Oskaloosa; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Oskaloosa has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in January. A normal year brings about 12 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 39 inches of water.
On November 14 Oskaloosa normally reaches 53° and falls to 33°. The record high is 83°, in 1999; the record low 9°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.35 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1967 at Perry Lake, 9 miles southwest, 150 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
