The Moscow 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
Partly cloudy; warmer
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12° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1976. Next is 16° in 1986.
Moscow’s center stands about 360 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 330 ft to 470 ft, a difference of 140 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Gordon Hill, about 670 ft, 10 miles east.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Loess (silt), from the Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 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.
Silt. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 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 Moscow reaches the Gulf of America by way of the North Fork Wolf, the Wolf River and the Mississippi: about 820 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Moscow; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Moscow has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in July; winter nights fall to about 30° in January. About 58 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Moscow normally reaches 63° and falls to 40°. The record high is 79°, in 1999; the record low 12°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.86 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1976 at Ames Plantation, 11 miles east-northeast, 180 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
