The Ganges 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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72° on Nov. 11, 2012, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1996. Next is 71° in 2010.
Ganges’s center stands about 660 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 570 ft to 750 ft, a difference of 180 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 17 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 Ganges reaches Lake Michigan by way of the North Branch Black: about 15 river miles. From there it moves on through the Great Lakes, over Niagara Falls and down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
Often dry. About 30% of the way is mapped as streams that run only after rain or snowmelt; the water makes the whole trip in floods.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Ganges; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Ganges has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 20° in January. About 35 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Ganges normally reaches 48° and falls to 34°. The record high is 62°, in 2009; the record low 9°, in 1996. The most rain on this date, 0.45 in, fell in 2021.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1996 at Holland Tulip City Airport, 13 miles north-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
