The Prairie City 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; cooler
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
77° on Nov. 12, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1916. Next is 72° in 1953.
Prairie City’s center stands about 2,830 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,810 ft to 2,960 ft, a difference of 150 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is White Hill, about 3,120 ft, 5 miles west-northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Ludlow Formation (sandstone), from the Paleocene, 56 to 66 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 29×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 19 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, clay. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1.0 mi of the line.
Silt, sand. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 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 Prairie City reaches the Gulf of America by way of South Branch Thunder Butte Creek, Thunder Butte Creek, the Moreau, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,630 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Oahe, Lake Sharpe, Lake Francis Case and Lewis and Clark Lake.
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 Prairie City; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Prairie City has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 10° in January. A normal year brings about 40 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 18 inches of water.
On November 14 Prairie City normally reaches 44° and falls to 23°. The record high is 70°, in 1990; the record low −17°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.29 in, fell in 1944.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1916 at Bison, 16 miles east. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
