The Mills 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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8° on Nov. 12, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1970. Next is 9° in 1976.
Mills’s center stands about 720 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 660 ft to 750 ft, a difference of 90 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.
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 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 Mills reaches Lake Huron by way of Kawkawlin Creek, the North Branch Kawkawlin and the Kawkawlin: about 40 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 Mills; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Mills has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 17° in January. About 33 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Mills normally reaches 46° and falls to 32°. The record high is 65°, in 1989; the record low 11°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.45 in, fell in 1980.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1970 at Midland, 12 miles south. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
