The Sand Creek 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.
71° on Nov. 14, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 69° in 1990.
Sand Creek’s center stands about 1,000 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 980 ft to 1,220 ft, a difference of 240 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Cambrian, undivided (sandstone), from the Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 50×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 24 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 Sand Creek reaches the Gulf of America by way of Hay Creek, the Red Cedar, the Chippewa and the Mississippi: about 1,820 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Sand Creek; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Sand Creek has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 80° in July; winter nights fall to about 2° in January. A normal year brings about 51 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 36 inches of water.
On November 14 Sand Creek normally reaches 41° and falls to 24°. The record high is 71°, in 1999; the record low 3°, in 1996. The most rain on this date, 1.00 in, fell in 2010.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Ridgeland 1 NNE, 10 miles west-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.