The Butman 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 cloudy
Mostly cloudy; warmer
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
76° on Nov. 11, 2022, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1892. Next is 73° in 2020.
Butman’s center stands about 960 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 830 ft to 1,140 ft, a difference of 310 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Emery Hill, about 1,390 ft, 14 miles northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Saginaw Formation (sandstone, shale), 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 25×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 19 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Jurassic, 145 to 202 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 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 Butman reaches Lake Huron by way of the Sugar, the Tittabawassee and the Saginaw: about 100 river miles. From there it moves on through the Great Lakes, over Niagara Falls and down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
65 miles of the trip are on the Tittabawassee.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Butman; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Butman has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 13° in January. A normal year brings about 48 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 34 inches of water.
On November 14 Butman normally reaches 46° and falls to 29°. The record high is 64°, in 1989; the record low 8°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.65 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1892 at Gladwin, 11 miles south, 180 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
