The Ottawa 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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3° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1949. Next is 10° in 1959.
Ottawa’s center stands about 730 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 710 ft to 760 ft, a difference of 50 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Salina Group (dolostone), from the Silurian, 422 to 445 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 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.
Dolostone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 23 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 1 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 Ottawa reaches Lake Erie by way of the Blanchard, the Auglaize and the Maumee: about 110 river miles. From there it moves on through the Great Lakes, over Niagara Falls and down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
65 miles of the trip are on the Maumee.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Ottawa; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Ottawa has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 19° in January. A normal year brings about 32 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 39 inches of water.
On November 14 Ottawa normally reaches 50° and falls to 34°. The record high is 72°, in 1971; the record low 11°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.60 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1949 at Pandora, 7 miles southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
