The Big Bend 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
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
1° on Nov. 16, 1933, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 1° in 1959.
Big Bend’s center stands about 830 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 770 ft to 1,000 ft, a difference of 230 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Lapham Hill, about 1,250 ft, 14 miles northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Silurian, undivided (dolostone), from the Silurian, 422 to 445 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 54×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Dolostone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 20 mi of the line.
Shale, dolostone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 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 Big Bend reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Fox River, the Illinois and the Mississippi: about 1,590 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Peoria Lake and Fox Lake.
1,190 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Big Bend; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Big Bend has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 81° in July; winter nights fall to about 12° in January. A normal year brings about 37 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 36 inches of water.
On November 14 Big Bend normally reaches 46° and falls to 29°. The record high is 70°, in 1971; the record low 6°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.09 in, fell in 1899.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Waukesha Wwtp, 8 miles north-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
