The Wessington Springs 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
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy; cooler
Showers likely
76° on Nov. 14, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 75° in 1990.
Wessington Springs’s center stands about 1,670 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,430 ft to 1,990 ft, a difference of 560 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Wessington Hills, about 1,920 ft, 1 miles northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pierre Shale (shale, bentonite), from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million 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 28×. 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, bentonite. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 23 mi of the line.
Chalk, marlstone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 1 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 Wessington Springs reaches the Gulf of America by way of Firesteel Creek, the James, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,180 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 Wessington Springs; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Wessington Springs 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 44 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 26 inches of water.
On November 14 Wessington Springs normally reaches 44° and falls to 24°. The record high is 76°, in 1999; the record low −4°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.49 in, fell in 1971.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Wessington Springs, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
