The Williston 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.
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12° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1976. Next is 16° in 1986.
Williston’s center stands about 480 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 400 ft to 550 ft, a difference of 150 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Gordon Hill, about 670 ft, 12 miles southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Loess (silt), from the Quaternary, less than 2.6 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 64×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sand. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Silt. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.7 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 Williston reaches the Gulf of America by way of Watkins Creek, the North Fork Wolf, the Wolf River and the Mississippi: about 830 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Williston; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Williston has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in July; winter nights fall to about 30° in January. About 58 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Williston normally reaches 63° and falls to 40°. The record high is 79°, in 1999; the record low 12°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.86 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1976 at Ames Plantation, 10 miles east-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
