The Wheeling 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
Sunny; warmer
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Partly cloudy
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9° on Nov. 12, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1996. Next is 11° in 2014.
Wheeling’s center stands about 650 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 640 ft to 720 ft, a difference of 80 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Silurian System undivided (dolostone, limestone), from the Silurian, 422 to 445 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 56×. 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: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 21 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 454 million years old. About 0.5 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 Wheeling reaches the Gulf of America by way of Buffalo Creek, the Des Plaines, the Illinois and the Mississippi: about 1,540 river miles.
Lake on the way: Peoria Lake.
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 Wheeling; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Wheeling has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 19° in January. About 32 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Wheeling normally reaches 49° and falls to 34°. The record high is 67°, in 2025; the record low 15°, in 1996. The most rain on this date, 0.19 in, fell in 2020.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1996 at Chicago Palwaukee Airport, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
