The Afton 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.
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy; warmer
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Showers likely
74° on Nov. 16, 2001, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1905. Next is 73° in 1964.
Afton’s center stands about 1,230 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,070 ft to 1,270 ft, a difference of 200 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Lansing Group (limestone, shale), from the Late Pennsylvanian, 299 to 307 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 61×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Limestone, shale. Age: Late Pennsylvanian, 299 to 307 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Late Pennsylvanian, 299 to 307 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Shale, mudstone. Age: Late Pennsylvanian, 299 to 307 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Middle Pennsylvanian to Late Pennsylvanian, 299 to 315 million years old. About 0.3 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 Afton reaches the Gulf of America by way of Twelvemile Creek, the Thompson, the Grand River, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,610 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 Afton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Afton has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 11° in January. About 38 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Afton normally reaches 49° and falls to 27°. The record high is 72°, in 1964; the record low −1°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 0.84 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1905 at Creston 2 SW, 10 miles west. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
