The Pella 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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71° on Nov. 11, 1964, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 71° in 1999.
Pella’s center stands about 870 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 840 ft to 1,090 ft, a difference of 250 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Wolf River batholith; Red River Granite, from the Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion 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 53×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Granite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Anorthosite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 0.4 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 Pella reaches Lake Michigan by way of the Embarrass, the Wolf River and the Fox River: about 170 river miles. From there it moves on through the Great Lakes, over Niagara Falls and down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
Lakes on the way: Lake Winnebago 6124, Lake Winneconne and Lake Butte des Morts.
55 miles of the trip are on the Embarrass.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Pella; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Pella has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 7° in January. A normal year brings about 44 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 33 inches of water.
On November 14 Pella normally reaches 44° and falls to 26°. The record high is 65°, in 1958; the record low 0°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.45 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Clintonville, 9 miles south-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
