The Dighton 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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87° on Nov. 17, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1901. Next is 86° in 1999.
Dighton’s center stands about 2,770 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,700 ft to 2,810 ft, a difference of 110 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Loess (silt), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 57×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 20 mi of the line.
Arkose. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 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 Dighton reaches the Gulf of America by way of South Fork Walnut Creek, Walnut Creek, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,630 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Murray Lake and Ozark Lake.
600 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Dighton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Dighton has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 16° in January. A normal year brings about 22 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 22 inches of water.
On November 14 Dighton normally reaches 57° and falls to 28°. The record high is 86°, in 1999; the record low −9°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 0.66 in, fell in 1926.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1901 at Healy, 12 miles northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
