The Rio Grande 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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12° on Nov. 14, 1986, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1912. Next is 13° in 1957.
Rio Grande’s center stands about 660 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 590 ft to 860 ft, a difference of 270 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Poplar Knob, about 1,020 ft, 7 miles south.
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 52×. 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, mudstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 20 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 4 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 Rio Grande reaches the Gulf of America by way of Raccoon Creek, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,700 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 Rio Grande; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Rio Grande has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in January. About 44 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Rio Grande normally reaches 57° and falls to 34°. The record high is 79°, in 1993; the record low 12°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.42 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1912 at Gallipolis, 11 miles east-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
