The Palmer 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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83° on Nov. 17, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 82° in 1999.
Palmer’s center stands about 1,340 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,300 ft to 1,440 ft, a difference of 140 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Dakota Formation (claystone, mudstone, shale), from the Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 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 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.
Claystone, mudstone, shale. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 18 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 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 Palmer reaches the Gulf of America by way of Peats Creek, the Republican, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,770 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 Palmer; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Palmer 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 Palmer 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, 13 miles north-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
