The Hills 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.
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy; cooler
Showers likely
77° on Nov. 14, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 74° in 1953.
Hills’s center stands about 1,490 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,400 ft to 1,540 ft, a difference of 140 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is The Mound, about 1,700 ft, 14 miles northeast.
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 3 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 11 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 90 to 100 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Quartzite, mudstone. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2 billion years old. About 3 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 Hills reaches the Gulf of America by way of Mud Creek, the Rock River, the Big Sioux, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,030 river miles.
1,170 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Hills; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Hills has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 6° in January. A normal year brings about 35 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 29 inches of water.
On November 14 Hills normally reaches 45° and falls to 24°. The record high is 77°, in 1999; the record low −20°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 1.30 in, fell in 1926.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Rock Rapids, 12 miles southeast, 140 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
