The Denver 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
Partly cloudy; warmer
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Showers likely
2° on Nov. 17, 1959, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1905. Next is 3° in 2019.
Denver’s center stands about 930 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 880 ft to 1,060 ft, a difference of 180 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Waller, about 1,090 ft, 5 miles north-northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Lansing Group (shale, limestone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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.
Shale, limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 19 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million 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 Denver reaches the Gulf of America by way of the East Fork Grand, the Grand River, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,570 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 Denver; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Denver has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 88° in July; winter nights fall to about 14° in January. About 38 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Denver normally reaches 53° and falls to 30°. The record high is 76°, in 1964; the record low 7°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.52 in, fell in 1947.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1905 at Albany, 10 miles south. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
