The Des Moines River 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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79° on Nov. 14, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1887. Next is 74° in 1953.
Des Moines River’s center stands about 1,450 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,420 ft to 1,550 ft, a difference of 130 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Undifferentiated (conglomerate, sandstone, mudstone), from the Late Cretaceous, 72 to 100 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.
Conglomerate, sandstone, mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 72 to 100 million years old. About 19 mi of the line.
Quartzite, mudstone. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2 billion years old. About 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 Des Moines River reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Des Moines and the Mississippi: about 1,830 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Roberts Creek and Big Creek Pounding Area.
1,330 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Des Moines River; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Des Moines River has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 5° in January. A normal year brings about 49 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 29 inches of water.
On November 14 Des Moines River normally reaches 42° and falls to 25°. The record high is 79°, in 1999; the record low −10°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.38 in, fell in 1983.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1887 at Tracy, 19 miles north-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
