The Burke 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 sunny
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
79° on Nov. 14, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1973. Next is 72° in 2001.
Burke’s center stands about 1,770 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,630 ft to 1,840 ft, a difference of 210 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Stony Point, about 1,970 ft, 9 miles north.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Sioux Quartzite (quartzite, mudstone), from the Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2 billion years old.
The section below crosses 2 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 45×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Quartzite, mudstone. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2 billion years old. About 15 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone, mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 72 to 100 million years old. About 10 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 Burke reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Rock River, the Big Sioux, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,090 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 Burke; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Burke has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 81° in July; winter nights fall to about 4° in January. A normal year brings about 46 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 30 inches of water.
On November 14 Burke normally reaches 41° and falls to 22°. The record high is 79°, in 1999; the record low −4°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 1.12 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1973 at Lake Wilson, 8 miles east, 120 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
