The Waldo 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 cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
82° on Nov. 16, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1949. Next is 81° in 1999.
Waldo’s center stands about 1,720 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,640 ft to 1,930 ft, a difference of 290 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Os, about 2,090 ft, 13 miles west.
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 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 38×. 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 12 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Claystone, mudstone, shale. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 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, chalk. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 0.8 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 Waldo reaches the Gulf of America by way of West Fork Wolf Creek, Wolf Creek, the Saline, the Smoky Hill, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,970 river miles.
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 Waldo; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Waldo has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 19° in January. About 25 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Waldo normally reaches 56° and falls to 30°. The record high is 80°, in 2025; the record low 3°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.60 in, fell in 1968.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1949 at Russell Municipal Airport, 17 miles south, 140 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
