The Olney 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
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
79° on Nov. 14, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1971. Next is 72° in 2001.
Olney’s center stands about 1,600 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,540 ft to 1,670 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 60×. 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 21 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 94 to 113 million 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 Olney reaches the Gulf of America by way of East Branch Kanaranzi Creek, Kanaranzi Creek, the Rock River, the Big Sioux, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,060 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 Olney; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Olney has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 5° in January. A normal year brings about 45 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 30 inches of water.
On November 14 Olney normally reaches 42° and falls to 24°. The record high is 79°, in 1999; the record low −4°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.30 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1971 at Worthington 2 NNE, 15 miles east. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
