The Thornton 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.
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
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Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
82° on Nov. 17, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1984. Next is 82° in 2025.
Thornton’s center stands about 5,200 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 5,020 ft to 5,420 ft, a difference of 400 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Lake Mesa, about 5,760 ft, 14 miles west.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Denver and Arapahoe Fms (sandstone, mudstone, conglomerate), from the Late Cretaceous to Paleocene, 56 to 100 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 30×. 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, mudstone, conglomerate. Age: Late Cretaceous to Paleocene, 56 to 100 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Gravel, unconsolidated. Age: Pleistocene, less than 0.5 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale, claystone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 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 Thornton reaches the Gulf of America by way of the South Platte, the Platte, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,390 river miles.
1,170 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Thornton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Thornton has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in July; winter nights fall to about 19° in January. A normal year brings about 45 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 14 inches of water.
On November 14 Thornton normally reaches 56° and falls to 27°. The record high is 79°, in 1990; the record low 1°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.45 in, fell in 1994.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1984 at Northglenn, 4 miles west-southwest, 170 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
