The Chester 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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75° on Nov. 11, 2022, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1905. Next is 74° in 2020.
Chester’s center stands about 900 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 830 ft to 970 ft, a difference of 140 ft: gently 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 3 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.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 4 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 Chester reaches Lake Michigan by way of the Thornapple and the Grand River: about 130 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 Thornapple.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Chester; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Chester has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 16° in January. About 36 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1905 at Eaton Rapids, 15 miles east-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
