The Blue River 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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Mostly sunny; warmer
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75° on Nov. 14, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1956. Next is 70° in 1990.
Blue River’s center stands about 680 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 640 ft to 1,110 ft, a difference of 470 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Red Hill, about 1,190 ft, 12 miles north.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Cambrian, undivided (sandstone), from the Cambrian, 487 to 542 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 32×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Dolostone. Age: Early Ordovician, 471 to 487 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 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 Blue River reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Wisconsin and the Mississippi: about 1,640 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Blue River; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Blue River has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 7° in January. A normal year brings about 38 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 38 inches of water.
On November 14 Blue River normally reaches 46° and falls to 27°. The record high is 75°, in 1999; the record low 6°, in 1996. The most rain on this date, 0.57 in, fell in 1994.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1956 at Gays Mills, 17 miles west-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
