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.
Cloudy
Mostly cloudy; warmer
Partly cloudy
Sunny
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
7° on Nov. 14, 1986, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1892. Next is 9° in 2019.
Spencer’s center stands about 810 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 720 ft to 1,150 ft, a difference of 430 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Desert Knob, about 1,330 ft, 11 miles east-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Dunkard Group (sandstone, siltstone, shale), from the Carboniferous to Permian, 252 to 324 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 36×. 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, siltstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous to Permian, 252 to 324 million years old. About 21 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million 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 Spring Creek, the Little Kanawha, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,830 river miles.
970 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
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 hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in January. A normal year brings about 24 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 47 inches of water.
On November 14 Spencer normally reaches 54° and falls to 32°. The record high is 79°, in 1909; the record low 7°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.96 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1892 at Spencer, here, 160 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
