The Walnut Grove 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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81° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1888. Next is 80° in 1911.
Walnut Grove’s center stands about 1,210 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,010 ft to 1,210 ft, a difference of 200 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Channel Sandstones, from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
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 45×. 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 18 mi of the line.
Limestone, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone. 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 Walnut Grove reaches the Gulf of America by way of Turkey Creek, the Sac, the Osage, 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 Walnut Grove; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Walnut Grove has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 24° in January. A normal year brings about 14 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 45 inches of water.
On November 14 Walnut Grove normally reaches 58° and falls to 37°. The record high is 78°, in 1973; the record low 10°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 0.98 in, fell in 1924.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1888 from the Springfield Area threaded record (Springfield Airport, 15 miles southeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
