The Fair Plain 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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76° on Nov. 11, 2022, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1887. Next is 74° in 1911.
Fair Plain’s center stands about 640 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 570 ft to 680 ft, a difference of 110 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Randall, about 820 ft, 14 miles south-southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Ellsworth Shale, from the Late Devonian, 359 to 384 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 62×. 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: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old. About 0.5 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 Fair Plain reaches Lake Michigan by way of the Saint Joseph: about 2 river miles. From there it moves on through the Great Lakes, over Niagara Falls and down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Fair Plain; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Fair Plain has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 20° in January. A normal year brings about 78 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 38 inches of water.
On November 14 Fair Plain normally reaches 50° and falls to 34°. The record high is 71°, in 1971; the record low 10°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.65 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1887 at Benton Harbor Airport, 3 miles north-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
