The Sidney 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 cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
77° on Nov. 14, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 76° in 1971.
Sidney’s center stands about 4,090 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 4,040 ft to 4,310 ft, a difference of 270 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows White River Group (clay), from the Early Oligocene to Late Oligocene, 23 to 34 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 34×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Clay. Age: Early Oligocene to Late Oligocene, 23 to 34 million years old. About 17 mi of the line.
Siltstone-mudstone, conglomerate-sandstone. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 7 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 Sidney reaches the Gulf of America by way of Lodgepole Creek, the South Platte, the Platte, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,260 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 Sidney; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Sidney has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 13° in December. About 16 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Sidney normally reaches 52° and falls to 22°. The record high is 77°, in 2025; the record low −3°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.16 in, fell in 1980.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Sidney Municipal Airport, 3 miles south, 200 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
