The Adams 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.
Sunny
Mostly sunny; warmer
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
80° on Nov. 11, 2002, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1942. Next is 79° in 1955.
Adams’s center stands about 560 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 430 ft to 650 ft, a difference of 220 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows St. Louis Limestone and Warsaw Limestone, from the Carboniferous, 324 to 359 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 59×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 23 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 2 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 Adams reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Red River, the Cumberland, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,190 river miles.
Lake on the way: Bards Lake.
970 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Adams; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Adams has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 27° in January. A normal year brings about 6 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 53 inches of water.
On November 14 Adams normally reaches 59° and falls to 38°. The record high is 77°, in 1999; the record low 15°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.87 in, fell in 1951.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1942 at Springfield Experiment Station, 15 miles east-southeast, 180 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
