The Valparaiso 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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74° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1961. Next is 73° in 1964.
Valparaiso’s center stands about 800 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 680 ft to 860 ft, a difference of 180 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Ellsworth Shale, from the Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 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 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. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 21 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 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.
Valparaiso straddles the St. Lawrence Divide. Rain on the east side runs to the Gulf of America; most of the rest goes to Lake Michigan.
From the center of town, a raindrop reaches Lake Michigan by way of the East Arm Little Calumet and the Portage-Burns Waterway: about 25 river miles. From there it moves on through the Great Lakes, over Niagara Falls and down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic. One that lands on the east side reaches the Gulf of America by way of Crooked Creek, the Kankakee, the Illinois and the Mississippi: about 1,570 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Valparaiso; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Valparaiso has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 15° in January. A normal year brings about 34 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 40 inches of water.
On November 14 Valparaiso normally reaches 49° and falls to 31°. The record high is 72°, in 1999; the record low 6°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.15 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1961 at Wanatah 2 WNW, 7 miles east-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
