The Broadland 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.
76° on Nov. 16, 2001, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1881. Next is 75° in 1953.
Broadland’s center stands about 1,300 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,290 ft to 1,330 ft, a difference of 40 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Niobrara Formation (chalk, marlstone, shale), from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 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.
Shale, bentonite. 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 7 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 Broadland reaches the Gulf of America by way of the James, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,190 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 Broadland; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Broadland has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 6° in January. A normal year brings about 44 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 23 inches of water.
On November 14 Broadland normally reaches 45° and falls to 23°. The record high is 74°, in 2025; the record low −18°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.44 in, fell in 1928.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1881 from the Huron Area threaded record (Huron Regional Airport, 10 miles southeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.