The Shelby 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. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1895. Next is 81° in 2025.
Shelby’s center stands about 1,650 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,610 ft to 1,660 ft, a difference of 50 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Carlile Shale, from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old.
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.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 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 Shelby reaches the Gulf of America by way of the North Branch Big Blue, the Big Blue, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,970 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 Shelby; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Shelby has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 13° in January. A normal year brings about 29 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 29 inches of water.
On November 14 Shelby normally reaches 51° and falls to 27°. The record high is 79°, in 1964; the record low −8°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 1.80 in, fell in 1926.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1895 at Osceola, 7 miles west. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
