The Cathay 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.
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Chance of showers
Mostly cloudy
Chance of showers
68° on Nov. 11, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1967. Next is 68° in 2025.
Cathay’s center stands about 1,580 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,560 ft to 1,610 ft, a difference of 50 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pierre Formation (shale), from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old.
The section below crosses 2 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 64×. 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. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 23 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 0.7 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 Cathay reaches the Gulf of America by way of Rocky Run, the James, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,650 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Columbia Road Reservoir and Depuy Dam Lake.
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 Cathay; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Cathay has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about −2° in January. About 21 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Cathay normally reaches 38° and falls to 19°. The record high is 67°, in 2001; the record low −3°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.19 in, fell in 1994.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1967 at Carrington 4 N, 14 miles east-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
