The Litchfield 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 1891. Next is 70° in 1928.
Litchfield’s center stands about 1,030 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,000 ft to 1,090 ft, a difference of 90 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Marshall Sandstone, from the Carboniferous, 324 to 359 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 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. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 15 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 9 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 Litchfield reaches Lake Michigan by way of Sand Creek and the Saint Joseph: about 190 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 Litchfield; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Litchfield has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 15° in January. A normal year brings about 44 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 40 inches of water.
On November 14 Litchfield normally reaches 48° and falls to 30°. The record high is 69°, in 1989; the record low 8°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.33 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1891 at Hillsdale, 10 miles southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
