The West Branch 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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70° on Nov. 11, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1857. Next is 69° in 1999.
West Branch’s center stands about 880 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 770 ft to 1,180 ft, a difference of 410 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Wewe Hills, about 1,610 ft, 12 miles west-northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Jacobsville Sandstone, from the Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion 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 29×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Gneiss, amphibolite, migmatite. Age: Paleoarchean to Neoarchean, 2.5 to 3.6 billion years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Gneiss, amphibolite. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Slate. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 497 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 West Branch reaches Lake Superior by way of Foster Creek and the Chocolay: about 15 river miles. From there it moves on through the Great Lakes, over Niagara Falls and down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of West Branch; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
West Branch has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 75° in July; winter nights fall to about 12° in January. A normal year brings about 102 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 30 inches of water.
On November 14 West Branch normally reaches 41° and falls to 29°. The record high is 64°, in 1884; the record low 5°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 1.25 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1857 at Marquette, 12 miles north-northwest, 270 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
