The Spring Valley Colony 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
76° on Nov. 14, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 75° in 1990.
Spring Valley Colony’s center stands about 1,640 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,580 ft to 1,760 ft, a difference of 180 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pierre Shale (shale, bentonite), from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 42×. 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 24 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 Spring Valley Colony reaches the Gulf of America by way of Crow Creek, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,180 river miles.
Lakes on the way: 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 Spring Valley Colony; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Spring Valley Colony 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 44 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 26 inches of water.
On November 14 Spring Valley Colony normally reaches 44° and falls to 24°. The record high is 76°, in 1999; the record low −4°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.49 in, fell in 1971.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Wessington Springs, 16 miles east. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
