The Howard 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.
77° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1950. Next is 76° in 1994.
Howard’s center stands about 940 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 890 ft to 1,170 ft, a difference of 280 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Braddock Mound, about 1,190 ft, 12 miles west-northwest.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 40×. 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, sandstone. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 20 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 2 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 Howard reaches the Gulf of America by way of Jelloway Creek, the Kokosing, the Walhonding, the Muskingum, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,920 river miles.
970 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Howard; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Howard has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 17° in January. About 44 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Howard normally reaches 51° and falls to 32°. The record high is 71°, in 1989; the record low 4°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.20 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1950 at Centerburg 2 SE, 19 miles west-southwest, 260 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.