The Alcester 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.
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Showers likely
79° on Nov. 15, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1897. Next is 78° in 1953.
Alcester’s center stands about 1,420 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,300 ft to 1,470 ft, a difference of 170 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Carlile Shale, from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 47×. 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. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 18 mi of the line.
Chalk, marlstone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 94 to 113 million years old. About 0.7 mi of the line.
Shale, mudstone, marlstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 0.3 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 Alcester reaches the Gulf of America by way of East Brule Creek, Brule Creek, the Big Sioux, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,970 river miles.
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 Alcester; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Alcester has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 7° in January. A normal year brings about 30 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 27 inches of water.
On November 14 Alcester normally reaches 46° and falls to 23°. The record high is 76°, in 1999; the record low −19°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 1.54 in, fell in 1926.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1897 at Centerville 6 SE, 14 miles west, 140 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
