The Atwater 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 cloudy
Partly cloudy
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
75° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 68° in 2022.
Atwater’s center stands about 1,140 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,090 ft to 1,250 ft, a difference of 160 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Allegheny and Pottsville Groups, Undivided (shale, siltstone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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 61×. 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, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 23 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone, sandstone. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 0.8 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 Atwater reaches the Gulf of America by way of Berlin Lake, the Mahoning, the Beaver, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 2,030 river miles.
Lake on the way: Berlin Lake.
970 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Atwater; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Atwater has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 17° in January. A normal year brings about 45 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 43 inches of water.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Ravenna 2 S, 10 miles northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
