The Big Flats 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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70° on Nov. 16, 2001, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1930. Next is 69° in 1941.
Big Flats’s center stands about 1,000 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 970 ft to 1,040 ft, a difference of 70 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Friendship Mound, about 1,300 ft, 9 miles south.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Cambrian, undivided (sandstone), from the Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old.
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.
Sandstone. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 24 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 Flats reaches the Gulf of America by way of Dead Horse Creek, Big Roche a Cri Creek, the Wisconsin and the Mississippi: about 1,800 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Wisconsin.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Big Flats; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Big Flats has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 6° in January. A normal year brings about 52 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 35 inches of water.
On November 14 Big Flats normally reaches 44° and falls to 26°. The record high is 62°, in 1944; the record low 2°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 0.40 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1930 at Friendship, 10 miles south. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
