The Spencer 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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2° on Nov. 12, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1996. Next is 3° in 2005.
Spencer’s center stands about 1,310 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,270 ft to 1,350 ft, a difference of 80 ft: gently rolling country.
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 2 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.
Sandstone. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 21 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 3 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 Spencer reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Yellow, the Wisconsin and the Mississippi: about 1,860 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Wisconsin.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Spencer; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Spencer has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 80° in July; winter nights fall to about 7° in January. About 25 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Spencer normally reaches 42° and falls to 26°. The record high is 62°, in 2025; the record low 4°, in 1996. The most rain on this date, 0.25 in, fell in 2021.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1996 at Marshfield Municipal Airport, 10 miles southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
