The Vassar 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. 14, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1963. Next is 81° in 2016.
Vassar’s center stands about 1,110 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 960 ft to 1,120 ft, a difference of 160 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Shawnee Group (limestone, shale), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
The section below crosses 2 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.
Limestone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 22 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 Vassar reaches the Gulf of America by way of Pomona Lake, Hundred and Ten Mile Creek, the Marais des Cygnes, the Osage, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,740 river miles.
Lake on the way: Pomona 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 Vassar; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Vassar has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in January. About 39 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Vassar normally reaches 56° and falls to 35°. The record high is 82°, in 1999; the record low 8°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.40 in, fell in 1980.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1963 at Pomona Lake, 3 miles east. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
