The Prairie Home 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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4.41 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1954. The next wettest, 2.96 inches, fell in 1985.
Prairie Home’s center stands about 890 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 730 ft to 890 ft, a difference of 160 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Osagean Series (limestone), from the Carboniferous, 324 to 359 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 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. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 19 mi of the line.
Limestone, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Clay, silt, sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 2 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 Prairie Home reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Clark Fork, Petite Saline Creek, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,370 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Prairie Home; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Prairie Home has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 88° in July; winter nights fall to about 20° 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 Prairie Home normally reaches 55° and falls to 35°. The record high is 83°, in 1999; the record low 11°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 1.65 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1954 at California, 13 miles south. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
