The Ball Bluff 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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68° on Nov. 17, 1953, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1892. Next is 68° in 1999.
Ball Bluff’s center stands about 1,250 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,230 ft to 1,400 ft, a difference of 170 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Quadna Mountain, about 1,620 ft, 15 miles west.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Slate and graywacke (slate, graywacke), from the Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2 billion 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.
Slate, graywacke. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2 billion 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 Ball Bluff reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Mississippi: about 2,110 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Pepin.
1,750 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Ball Bluff; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Ball Bluff has a cold desert climate. Summer afternoons average 78° in July; winter nights fall to about −2° in January. Barely 0.0 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Ball Bluff normally reaches 38° and falls to 23°. The record high is 64°, in 2005; the record low −7°, in 1919. The most rain on this date, 1.24 in, fell in 1909.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1892 at Sandy Lake Dam Libby, 11 miles south-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
