The Fort Walton Beach 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.
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
84° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1996. Next is 83° in 2015.
Fort Walton Beach’s center stands about 10 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 50 ft, a difference of 50 ft: nearly flat ground. Open water lies within three miles.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Undifferentiated sediments (sand, clay), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 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.
Sand. Age: Late Pliocene, 2.6 to 3.6 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 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.
Rain that falls on Fort Walton Beach runs straight into Choctawhatchee Bay and the Gulf of America.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Fort Walton Beach; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Fort Walton Beach has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in July; winter nights fall to about 45° in January. About 55 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1996 at Destin Fort Walton Beach Airport, 9 miles east. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
