The Wataga 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; warmer
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Partly cloudy
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76° on Nov. 11, 1964, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1895. Next is 75° in 1949.
Wataga’s center stands about 830 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 740 ft to 840 ft, a difference of 100 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Shelburn-Patoka Formations undivided (shale, limestone), from the Late Pennsylvanian, 304 to 307 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.
Shale, sandstone, coal. Age: Middle Pennsylvanian to Late Pennsylvanian, 304 to 315 million years old. About 22 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Pennsylvanian, 304 to 307 million years old. About 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 Wataga reaches the Gulf of America by way of North Creek, Fox Creek, the Illinois and the Mississippi: about 1,430 river miles.
1,190 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Wataga; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Wataga has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 14° in January. A normal year brings about 26 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 39 inches of water.
On November 14 Wataga normally reaches 49° and falls to 30°. The record high is 75°, in 1971; the record low 8°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 2.34 in, fell in 1926.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1895 at Galesburg, 8 miles southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
