The Phillips 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
85° on Nov. 14, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1895. Next is 82° in 1999.
Phillips’s center stands about 1,890 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,800 ft to 1,890 ft, a difference of 90 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 23 mi of the line.
Siltstone-mudstone, conglomerate-sandstone. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 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 Phillips reaches the Gulf of America by way of Lincoln Creek, the Big Blue, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,020 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 Phillips; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Phillips has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 88° in July; winter nights fall to about 16° in January. A normal year brings about 28 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 27 inches of water.
On November 14 Phillips normally reaches 52° and falls to 29°. The record high is 85°, in 2025; the record low −7°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 0.75 in, fell in 1947.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1895 from the Grand Island Area threaded record (Grand Island Central Ne Regional Airport, 7 miles northwest). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
