The Severance 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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82° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1891. Next is 79° in 1964.
Severance’s center stands about 950 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 880 ft to 1,080 ft, a difference of 200 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Lookout Mountain, about 1,190 ft, 10 miles north-northeast.
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 55×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Clay, silt, sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 0.8 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 Severance reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Wolf River, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,650 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 Severance; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Severance has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 88° in July; winter nights fall to about 16° in January. A normal year brings about 11 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 38 inches of water.
On November 14 Severance normally reaches 53° and falls to 30°. The record high is 76°, in 1964; the record low 2°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 1.85 in, fell in 1931.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1891 at Horton, 16 miles west-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
