The Harvard 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. 15, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1971. Next is 80° in 1999.
Harvard’s center stands about 1,810 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,760 ft to 1,830 ft, a difference of 70 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 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.
Limestone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 22 mi of the line.
Siltstone-mudstone, conglomerate-sandstone. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 2 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 Harvard reaches the Gulf of America by way of School Creek, the West Fork Big Blue, the Big Blue, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,990 river miles.
Lake on the way: Tuttle Creek 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 Harvard; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Harvard has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 16° in January. A normal year brings about 18 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 30 inches of water.
On November 14 Harvard normally reaches 52° and falls to 29°. The record high is 80°, in 1999; the record low 10°, in 2022. The most rain on this date, 0.63 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1971 at Clay Center, 7 miles south-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
