The Stockton 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.
84° on Nov. 17, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1953. Next is 82° in 2012.
Stockton’s center stands about 1,800 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,730 ft to 1,930 ft, a difference of 200 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Twin Mound, about 2,130 ft, 10 miles south-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvium (sand, silt, clay), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 48×. 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, limestone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, chalk. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Arkose. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 1 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 Stockton reaches the Gulf of America by way of the South Fork Solomon, the Solomon, the Smoky Hill, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,020 river miles.
Lake on the way: Waconda Lake.
1,170 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Stockton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Stockton has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 94° in July; winter nights fall to about 16° in January. About 25 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Stockton normally reaches 57° and falls to 28°. The record high is 79°, in 1990; the record low 0°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.09 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1953 at Webster Dam, 9 miles west-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.