The Wathena 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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82° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1897. Next is 78° in 1949.
Wathena’s center stands about 840 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 790 ft to 1,050 ft, a difference of 260 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Lookout Mountain, about 1,190 ft, 15 miles northwest.
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 52×. 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 8 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Clay, silt, sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 2 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 Wathena reaches the Gulf of America by way of Peters Creek, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,600 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 Wathena; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Wathena has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 88° in July; winter nights fall to about 17° in January. About 35 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Wathena normally reaches 54° and falls to 31°. The record high is 77°, in 1964; the record low 5°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 1.44 in, fell in 1931.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1897 at St Joseph Rosecrans Memorial Airport, 2 miles east-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
