The Wakefield 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
81° on Nov. 15, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1894. Next is 79° in 1930.
Wakefield’s center stands about 1,400 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,370 ft to 1,530 ft, a difference of 160 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Carlile Shale, from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 63×. 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: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 20 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 0.4 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 Wakefield reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Logan Creek Dredge, the Elkhorn, the Platte, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,900 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 Wakefield; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Wakefield has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 9° in January. A normal year brings about 36 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 31 inches of water.
On November 14 Wakefield normally reaches 49° and falls to 24°. The record high is 79°, in 1930; the record low −18°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 1.25 in, fell in 1926.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1894 at Wakefield 3 NW, 3 miles northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
