The Chesterton 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.
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76° on Nov. 11, 2022, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1989. Next is 73° in 1989.
Chesterton’s center stands about 650 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 600 ft to 720 ft, a difference of 120 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Antrim Shale (black-shale), from the Devonian, 359 to 422 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.
Shale. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 6 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 Chesterton reaches Lake Michigan by way of Coffee Creek, the East Arm Little Calumet and the Portage-Burns Waterway: about 13 river miles. From there it moves on through the Great Lakes, over Niagara Falls and down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Chesterton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Chesterton has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in January. A normal year brings about 40 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 39 inches of water.
On November 14 Chesterton normally reaches 49° and falls to 35°. The record high is 73°, in 1989; the record low 15°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.29 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1989 at Indiana Dunes National Park, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
