The Ames 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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84° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 81° in 1931.
Ames’s center stands about 1,230 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,210 ft to 1,380 ft, a difference of 170 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Indian Peak, about 1,460 ft, 8 miles west.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Dakota Group (sandstone, shale), from the Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old.
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.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 24 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 Ames reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Platte, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,820 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 Ames; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Ames has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 13° in January. About 30 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Ames normally reaches 50° and falls to 28°. The record high is 74°, in 1990; the record low −4°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 1.33 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Fremont, 8 miles east. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
