The Cedar 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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74° on Nov. 11, 2022, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1896. Next is 69° in 2020.
Cedar’s center stands about 1,310 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,140 ft to 1,410 ft, a difference of 270 ft: rolling country.
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 2 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 34×. 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 17 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Jurassic, 145 to 202 million years old. About 7 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 Cedar reaches Lake Michigan by way of Cat Creek, the Muskegon and the Middle Channel Muskegon: about 110 river miles. From there it moves on through the Great Lakes, over Niagara Falls and down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
Lake on the way: Muskegon Lake.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Cedar; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Cedar has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 81° in July; winter nights fall to about 12° in February. A normal year brings about 61 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 38 inches of water.
On November 14 Cedar normally reaches 45° and falls to 28°. The record high is 65°, in 1909; the record low 4°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 1.53 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1896 at Big Rapids Water Treatment Plant, 17 miles south-southwest, 410 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
