The Cowles 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 cloudy
Partly cloudy; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
82° on Nov. 15, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1894. Next is 81° in 2016.
Cowles’s center stands about 1,800 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,740 ft to 1,940 ft, a difference of 200 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Niobrara Formation (limestone, 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 47×. 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, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 23 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 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 Cowles reaches the Gulf of America by way of Elm Creek, the Republican, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,900 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 Cowles; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Cowles has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in July; winter nights fall to about 12° in January. A normal year brings about 19 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 26 inches of water.
On November 14 Cowles normally reaches 53° and falls to 25°. The record high is 79°, in 1999; the record low −3°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.14 in, fell in 1926.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1894 at Red Cloud, 6 miles southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
