The Saginaw 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.
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
11° on Nov. 14, 2018, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1973. Next is 13° in 2019.
Saginaw’s center stands about 1,080 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 910 ft to 1,150 ft, a difference of 240 ft: rolling country.
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 48×. 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 12 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone, mudstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 0.9 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 Saginaw reaches the Gulf of America by way of Thurman Creek, Shoal Creek, the Spring, the Neosho, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,170 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Murray Lake and Ozark Lake.
600 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Saginaw; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Saginaw has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in January. About 47 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Saginaw normally reaches 60° and falls to 35°. The record high is 80°, in 1999; the record low 11°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 2.00 in, fell in 1985.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1973 at Diamond 2 W, 7 miles east-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
