The Wilson 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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83° on Nov. 17, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1964. Next is 80° in 2021.
Wilson’s center stands about 1,690 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,590 ft to 1,830 ft, a difference of 240 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvium (sand, silt, clay), from the Pleistocene, 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 42×. 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: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Claystone, mudstone, shale. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale, chalk. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.6 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 Wilson reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Smoky Hill, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,930 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 Wilson; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Wilson has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in January. A normal year brings about 10 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 26 inches of water.
On November 14 Wilson normally reaches 57° and falls to 31°. The record high is 78°, in 2025; the record low 4°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.15 in, fell in 1978.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1964 at Wilson Lake, 10 miles north, 180 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
