The Steele City 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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−7° on Nov. 12, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 0° in 1916.
Steele City’s center stands about 1,310 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,240 ft to 1,450 ft, a difference of 210 ft: rolling country.
The section below crosses 6 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.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Claystone, mudstone, shale. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 0.8 mi of the line.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.7 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 Steele City reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Little Blue, the Big Blue, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,790 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 Steele City; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Steele City has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 88° in July; winter nights fall to about 14° in January. A normal year brings about 21 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 32 inches of water.
On November 14 Steele City normally reaches 53° and falls to 28°. The record high is 83°, in 1999; the record low 0°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.22 in, fell in 1926.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Fairbury 7 S, 9 miles west, 150 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
