The Springfield 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.
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80° on Nov. 11, 2002, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1942. Next is 79° in 1955.
Springfield’s center stands about 660 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 530 ft to 750 ft, a difference of 220 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Sugar Camp Hill, about 900 ft, 15 miles east-southeast.
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 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 43×. 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 16 mi of the line.
Chert. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.7 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 Springfield reaches the Gulf of America by way of Wartrace Creek, the Sulphur Fork Red, the Red River, the Cumberland, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,210 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 Springfield; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Springfield 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 Springfield 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, 4 miles southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
