The Wakonda 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; cooler
Showers likely
79° on Nov. 15, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1897. Next is 78° in 1953.
Wakonda’s center stands about 1,390 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,260 ft to 1,460 ft, a difference of 200 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Niobrara Formation (chalk, marlstone, 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 41×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Chalk, marlstone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 16 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale, bentonite. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 3 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 Wakonda reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Vermillion, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,960 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 Wakonda; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Wakonda has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 7° in January. A normal year brings about 30 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 27 inches of water.
On November 14 Wakonda normally reaches 46° and falls to 23°. The record high is 76°, in 1999; the record low −19°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 1.54 in, fell in 1926.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1897 at Centerville 6 SE, 11 miles east-northeast, 110 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
