The Loretto 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
3.53 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1893. The next wettest, 2.53 inches, fell in 1982.
Loretto’s center stands about 1,830 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,780 ft to 2,000 ft, a difference of 220 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Ogallala Group or Formation (siltstone-mudstone, conglomerate-sandstone), from the Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 53×. 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 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 Loretto reaches the Gulf of America by way of Beaver Creek, the Loup, the Platte, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,940 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 Loretto; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Loretto has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 11° in January. A normal year brings about 27 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 27 inches of water.
On November 14 Loretto normally reaches 49° and falls to 25°. The record high is 75°, in 1956; the record low −15°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 0.49 in, fell in 1926.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Albion, 7 miles southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
