The Pender 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 sunny
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
81° on Nov. 15, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1894. Next is 79° in 1930.
Pender’s center stands about 1,330 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,310 ft to 1,480 ft, a difference of 170 ft: gently 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 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
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.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 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 Pender reaches the Gulf of America by way of Stage Creek, the Logan Creek Dredge, the Elkhorn, the Platte, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,890 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 Pender; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Pender has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 9° in January. A normal year brings about 36 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 31 inches of water.
On November 14 Pender normally reaches 49° and falls to 24°. The record high is 79°, in 1930; the record low −18°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 1.25 in, fell in 1926.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1894 at Wakefield 3 NW, 16 miles northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
