The Mellette 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.
Mostly sunny
Sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy; cooler
Showers likely
−17° on Nov. 14, 2014, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is −15° in 1959.
Mellette’s center stands about 1,300 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,280 ft to 1,300 ft, a difference of 20 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pierre Shale (shale, bentonite), 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 19 mi of the line.
Chalk, marlstone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 5 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 Mellette reaches the Gulf of America by way of Snake Creek, the James, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,290 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 Mellette; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Mellette has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 2° in January. A normal year brings about 43 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 22 inches of water.
On November 14 Mellette normally reaches 43° and falls to 20°. The record high is 68°, in 2015; the record low −17°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 1.00 in, fell in 1895.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 from the Aberdeen Area threaded record (Aberdeen Regional Airport, 20 miles north-northeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
