The Ward 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
74° on Nov. 14, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 73° in 1953.
Ward’s center stands about 1,760 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,640 ft to 1,770 ft, a difference of 130 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Sioux Quartzite, from the Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 43×. 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 6 mi of the line.
Chert, shale, chalk. Age: Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Shale, bentonite. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Quartzite. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Metabasalt, greenstone. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone, mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 72 to 100 million years old. About 2 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 Ward reaches the Gulf of America by way of Spring Creek, the Big Sioux, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,150 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 Ward; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Ward has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 81° in July; winter nights fall to about 3° in January. A normal year brings about 40 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 28 inches of water.
On November 14 Ward normally reaches 42° and falls to 22°. The record high is 74°, in 1999; the record low −18°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 1.30 in, fell in 1909.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Flandreau, 10 miles southwest, 200 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
