The Richmond 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.
74° on Nov. 11, 2022, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1941. Next is 73° in 1971.
Richmond’s center stands about 980 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 890 ft to 1,050 ft, a difference of 160 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Sinnipee Group (dolostone), from the Ordovician, 445 to 487 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.
Dolostone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 23 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 0.7 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Early Ordovician, 471 to 487 million years old. About 0.5 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 Richmond reaches the Gulf of America by way of Turtle Creek, the Rock River and the Mississippi: about 1,660 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Richmond; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Richmond has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 12° in January. A normal year brings about 34 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 36 inches of water.
On November 14 Richmond normally reaches 46° and falls to 29°. The record high is 73°, in 1971; the record low 4°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.84 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1941 at Whitewater Wwtp, 9 miles north, 170 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.