The Airway Heights 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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67° on Nov. 12, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1881. Next is 65° in 1899.
Airway Heights’s center stands about 2,400 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,260 ft to 2,440 ft, a difference of 180 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Krell Hill, about 3,670 ft, 14 miles east-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Older glacial drift (fine-detrital, coarse-detrital), from the Late Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 3.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 16×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Basalt. Age: Late Oligocene to Early Pliocene, 3.6 to 28 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Late Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 3.6 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Metasedimentary. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Siltstone, sandstone. Age: Middle Miocene to Early Pliocene, 3.6 to 16 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene, 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. 1 smaller unit along the line are not listed.
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 Airway Heights reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Spokane and the Columbia: about 700 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Umatilla.
360 miles of the trip are on the Columbia.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Airway Heights; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Airway Heights has a dry-summer warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 24° in December. A normal year brings about 45 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 16 inches of water.
On November 14 Airway Heights normally reaches 43° and falls to 31°. The record high is 65°, in 1899; the record low −7°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 0.74 in, fell in 1966.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1881 from the Spokane Area threaded record (Spokane International Airport, 3 miles east-southeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
