The Colon 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, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1895. Next is 75° in 2022.
Colon’s center stands about 870 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 830 ft to 940 ft, a difference of 110 ft: gently rolling country.
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. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 24 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 Colon reaches Lake Michigan by way of Spring Creek, the Prairie and the Saint Joseph: about 130 river miles. From there it moves on through the Great Lakes, over Niagara Falls and down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
110 miles of the trip are on the Saint Joseph.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Colon; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Colon has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 17° in January. A normal year brings about 41 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 40 inches of water.
On November 14 Colon normally reaches 48° and falls to 31°. The record high is 72°, in 1989; the record low 9°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.40 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1895 at Three Rivers, 16 miles west. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
