The Reading 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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81° on Nov. 11, 1949, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1896. Next is 79° in 1899.
Reading’s center stands about 1,090 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,050 ft to 1,220 ft, a difference of 170 ft: gently rolling country.
The section below crosses 5 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.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 16 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Gravel. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 0.3 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 Reading reaches the Gulf of America by way of Mud Creek, the Marais des Cygnes, the Osage, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,770 river miles.
Lake on the way: Melvern 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 Reading; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Reading has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in January. A normal year brings about 10 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 39 inches of water.
On November 14 Reading normally reaches 55° and falls to 32°. The record high is 77°, in 1897; the record low 8°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 1.75 in, fell in 1931.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1896 at Osage City, 12 miles northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
