The Cairo 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.
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
85° on Nov. 14, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1895. Next is 82° in 1999.
Cairo’s center stands about 1,950 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,920 ft to 2,020 ft, a difference of 100 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pierre 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.
Siltstone-mudstone, conglomerate-sandstone. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 21 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 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 Cairo reaches the Gulf of America by way of Dry Creek, Prairie Creek, the Platte, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,970 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 Cairo; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Cairo has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 88° in July; winter nights fall to about 16° in January. A normal year brings about 28 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 27 inches of water.
On November 14 Cairo normally reaches 52° and falls to 29°. The record high is 85°, in 2025; the record low −7°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 0.75 in, fell in 1947.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1895 from the Grand Island Area threaded record (Grand Island Central Ne Regional Airport, 15 miles east-southeast, 110 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
