The Whitney 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
Mostly cloudy; warmer
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
71° on Nov. 11, 2022, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1890. Next is 69° in 1990.
Whitney’s center stands about 640 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 570 ft to 660 ft, a difference of 90 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Michigan Formation (shale), from the Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 64×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 13 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.
Rain that falls on Whitney runs straight into Lake Huron. 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 Whitney; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Whitney has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 80° in July; winter nights fall to about 13° in January. A normal year brings about 49 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 32 inches of water.
On November 14 Whitney normally reaches 46° and falls to 30°. The record high is 65°, in 1994; the record low 9°, in 1908. The most rain on this date, 1.28 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1890 at East Tawas, 13 miles north-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
