The Ethel 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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Chance of showers
8° on Nov. 12, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1989. Next is 12° in 2000.
Ethel’s center stands about 820 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 700 ft to 950 ft, a difference of 250 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Marmaton Group (limestone, shale), 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 56×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Limestone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 16 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 9 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 Ethel reaches the Gulf of America by way of Little Turkey Creek, the Chariton, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,450 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 Ethel; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Ethel has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 88° in July; winter nights fall to about 19° in January. About 42 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Ethel normally reaches 53° and falls to 34°. The record high is 80°, in 1999; the record low 15°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.43 in, fell in 1994.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1989 at Long Branch Reservoir, 16 miles southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
