The Houghton 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
Partly cloudy; warmer
Mostly sunny
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−3° on Nov. 17, 1959, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 1° in 1901.
Houghton’s center stands about 720 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 640 ft to 720 ft, a difference of 80 ft: gently rolling country.
The section below crosses 3 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.
Dolostone, limestone. Age: Middle Mississippian to Late Mississippian, 324 to 347 million years old. About 15 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone, siltstone. Age: Early Pennsylvanian to Middle Pennsylvanian, 307 to 324 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Dolostone, limestone. Age: Early Mississippian to Middle Mississippian, 331 to 359 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.
A raindrop that lands in Houghton reaches the Gulf of America by way of West Branch Sugar Creek, Sugar Creek and the Mississippi: about 1,370 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Houghton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Houghton has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 13° in January. A normal year brings about 25 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 38 inches of water.
On November 14 Houghton normally reaches 50° and falls to 29°. The record high is 74°, in 1990; the record low 3°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.40 in, fell in 1899.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Mount Pleasant 1 SW, 12 miles north. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
