St Louis Real Estate

Geography

St. Louis geography has played a large role in it's development as a city.  Going back thousands of years to when the Mississippian Indians settled the area in part due to it's close proximity to abundant water, St. Louis' location at the confluence of the continent's longest river and largest river has made it an attractive place to locate. 

The geographic center of the St. Louis Metropolitan Statistical Area is located in north St. Louis City on Madison Avenue just off of North Jefferson Avenue.  The specific location is 38.648056,-90.21222. 

St. Louis sits about 535 feet above sea level.  The northern portions of the area are flat and had been primarily prairie land except for the flood plains which consisted of hardwood forests.

The Ozark Mountain range starts in the southern reaches of the St. Louis metro area with Southwestern St. Louis county and Jefferson County ranging from rolling hills to some fairly rugged terrain.  On the Illinois side of the Mississippi river the land is flat except for near the rivers where it can become hilly.

Climate

The local chamber of commerce would tell you that the St. Louis climate offers "something for everybody" another way of putting it would be, "St. Louis weather sucks!" 

St. Louis is located almost smack in the middle of the continent with no major mountain ranges or bodies of water to moderate it's weather. 

In the winter we can get extremely cold (though it usually doesn't stay that way for long).  The coldest day that I can remember it got down to 17 degrees below zero.  The official record coldest day was January 5, 1884 when it got down to -22 degrees Fahrenheit.  Unofficially, the record was -23 degrees on January 29, 1873.  During a "normal" winter here we have about 2 or 3 days of below zero weather, but can have periods of time when it will get this cold and stay that way.  The average temperature in January in St. Louis is a fairly moderate 21 degrees.

In the summer St. Louis can become almost unbearable.  Our average high temperature in July is 90 degrees with the highest recorded temperature being 115 degrees on July 14th, 1954.  All that said, it's not the heat, it's the humidity that kills you.  It's not unusual for St. Louis to have 90 + degree days with the humidity rising into the 80% + range.

One of the other things about St. Louis weather that is kind of wild is how fast it can change.  It's not unusual to have a day in the late fall to early spring that can get into the 70's or even more, then in a matter of hours plummet to the low 20's or even lower.  What really takes some getting used to is when the jet stream starts bouncing up and down and these temperature swings can happen more than once in a short period of time.

Average rainfall in St. Louis is around 38.5 inches and average snowfall is around 18.6 inches per year.

St. Louis experiences about 40 to 50 days a year where there will be thundershowers.  Sometimes they can be very strong and produce hail and heavy winds.  Tornadoes are fairly common to the area with one of the worst tornadoes ever recorded in the US touching down here on May 27, 1896 which killed 255 people.

 Click Here To Go To St. Louis History (Next)

Click Here To Return To Information About St. Louis

Click Here To Return To Main Page

Click Here To Contact Us