The Wheaton 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.
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
79° on Nov. 17, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1951. Next is 76° in 1964.
Wheaton’s center stands about 1,510 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,300 ft to 1,520 ft, a difference of 220 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Drift (sand, silt), from the Pleistocene, 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 39×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Limestone, shale. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.1 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 Wheaton reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Clear Fork, the Black Vermillion, the Big Blue, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,760 river miles.
Lake on the way: Tuttle Creek 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 Wheaton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Wheaton has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 88° in July; winter nights fall to about 15° in January. About 33 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Wheaton normally reaches 53° and falls to 29°. The record high is 75°, in 1964; the record low 4°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.51 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1951 at Frankfort 6 NE, 19 miles north, 250 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
