The Westphalia 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.
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny; warmer
Sunny
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
80° on Nov. 16, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1960. Next is 79° in 1971.
Westphalia’s center stands about 1,100 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,030 ft to 1,180 ft, a difference of 150 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Douglas Group (shale, sandstone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 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, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 17 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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 Westphalia reaches the Gulf of America by way of Thomas Creek, Pottawatomie Creek, the Marais des Cygnes, the Osage, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,750 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 Westphalia; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Westphalia has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 19° in January. About 37 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Westphalia normally reaches 57° and falls to 34°. The record high is 79°, in 1971; the record low 8°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.55 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1960 at John Redmond Lake, 15 miles west-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
