The Gerster 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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82° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1955. Next is 80° in 1958.
Gerster’s center stands about 820 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 760 ft to 990 ft, a difference of 230 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Spangler Hill, about 980 ft, 12 miles west-southwest.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 44×. 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. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 16 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone, mudstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Early Ordovician, 471 to 487 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 1 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 Gerster reaches the Gulf of America by way of Weaubleau Creek, the Osage, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,530 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 Gerster; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Gerster has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 21° in January. A normal year brings about 10 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 43 inches of water.
On November 14 Gerster normally reaches 57° and falls to 35°. The record high is 79°, in 1964; the record low 10°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 2.13 in, fell in 1985.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1955 at Osceola, 9 miles northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
