The Howells 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
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
−4° on Nov. 16, 2014, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1934. Next is 3° in 1997.
Howells’s center stands about 1,480 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,440 ft to 1,640 ft, a difference of 200 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Greenhorn Limestone and Graneros Shale (shale, limestone), 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 46×. 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, limestone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 12 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 Howells reaches the Gulf of America by way of East Fork Maple Creek, Maple Creek, the Elkhorn, the Platte, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,870 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 Howells; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Howells has a dry-winter hot-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 13° in January. A normal year brings about 24 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 29 inches of water.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1934 at Howells, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
