The St. Joseph 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 1897. Next is 78° in 1949.
St. Joseph’s center stands about 930 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 790 ft to 1,050 ft, a difference of 260 ft: rolling country.
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 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 52×. 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 14 mi of the line.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Clay, silt, sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 0.4 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 0.3 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 St. Joseph reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,600 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 St. Joseph; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
St. Joseph has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 88° in July; winter nights fall to about 17° in January. About 35 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 St. Joseph normally reaches 54° and falls to 31°. The record high is 77°, in 1964; the record low 5°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 1.44 in, fell in 1931.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1897 at St Joseph Rosecrans Memorial Airport, 5 miles west, 120 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
